Everything else I did that week was surgical.

The freezes, the filings, the movers, the regulators — all of it was the disciplined work of the woman who had built the trust, executed without heat, because heat makes you sloppy and I could not afford to be sloppy.

But a person is not only a strategist.

Somewhere under the litigator’s calm there was still a wife who had loved that smiling man in the velvet tuxedo, who had believed the portrait when it was painted, and she needed, just once, to put a mark on the lie of it before she walked out of that house forever.

So I let her have her two red strokes.