“Mabel?” His voice came out cracked and small, nothing like the voice that had asked how quickly this could be finalized.

“Mabel, what — what is happening?

The bank froze my accounts.

The board voted me out.

They’re telling me that you own sixty percent of Locke Global’s debt shares.

That can’t — how can that be true?”

I rocked my sleeping daughter, and I looked up at the man I had married, and I felt, to my own faint surprise, almost nothing at all.

“It’s true,” I said evenly.