Every document that undid him was a document he had signed of his own free will, in the presence of his own attorney, in the full daylight of a settlement he controlled.

His lawyer had begged him to read the deeds.

I had said, on my way out the door, in plain words, that the keys were not the same as ownership.

The relocation consent that carried my daughters to another continent had his own signature at the bottom of it.

He was not the victim of a clever woman.

He was the victim of his own certainty that a woman was not worth reading carefully — and that certainty had been the load-bearing wall of his entire character for as long as I’d known him.

When it gave way, it took the whole house down, and I had done nothing but decline, at last, to keep propping it up.