I want to record how strange it was to make that call.

For forty years, Luca Vance had been the first person I telephoned with any news, good or bad — the friend you call when your father dies, when your daughter is born, when you do not know what to do.

And here I was, at half past four in the morning, making the most consequential phone call of my life specifically to protect his wife from him, specifically to set the machinery of the law against the person I had spent four decades loving.

There is no word for that feeling.