It was only from that circle of cardboard boxes on my new living-room floor, with the forensic accountant’s pages spread around me, that I could finally stand outside the marriage and see its actual architecture — see that it had been built, from the foundation up, not as a home two people lived in together, but as a mechanism for moving what was mine into accounts that were his.

Chapter 14 — The Deposition

Brandon’s lawyers tried, at first, to tell a story so brazen I almost admired the nerve of it.

I had abandoned the marriage on a whim, they said.

My mother was a toxic influence who had wormed her way between us.

The transfers to his family had all been mutually agreed.

And the assault — the assault was merely “a mutual struggle in the course of a heated argument.” Claire read their filing aloud in her office and then set it down and laughed, one short dry note, and tapped the medical report and the police photographs stacked on her desk.

“A mutual struggle,” she said.