Chapter 13 — Sixty Million on Eighteen Hundred

Two months later I filed.

Gavin resisted the way a drowning man resists the shore, emotionally and pointlessly, but there was nothing to contest; the law was clear.

And during the process, his whole financial trail came into the light, and it was worse laid out in a column than it had ever been in my imagination: nearly one and a half million dollars, spent over two years, on apartments and dinners and vacations and gifts for Camila.

My attorney read it aloud, and I sat there matching each figure to its shadow in my own life — the winter I didn’t buy boots and wore my old ones with cardboard in the soles; the birthday I told him, brightly, that I didn’t need anything; the coffees I skipped; the shoes for Mia I agonized over.