She looked at my hands, then at my face, as if I had answered a question she had secretly feared asking.

“If that’s what you want,” she said, and left before I could hear what else she might have said.

I called my lawyer the next morning.

The settlement figure came from my guilt, not any calculation.

Twenty million dollars seemed large enough to compensate for three years in which I had withheld the one thing she might have wanted from me: an honest answer.

PART 5