What Julian did was look at that death — at the impending death of his own four-year-old son, and at the annihilating grief it would bring down on the boy’s mother — and see, in it, a business opportunity.

While I was praying at a hospital bedside, he was calculating.

He looked at the worst thing that would ever happen to our family, and he did not grieve it; he planned around it.

He asked himself, in writing, how he could best profit from my heartbreak, and he concluded, correctly, that a woman destroyed by the loss of her child would be too weak to notice she was being robbed.

My child was dying, and my husband’s response was to draw up a schedule.

“Forward those emails to my attorney, Chloe,” I said.