But shaking hands, I had learned, are not the same thing as regret.

My body was catching up to what my judgment had already done.

It was not asking me to undo it.

Chapter 14 — The Story He Had Prepared

Brandon’s answer came two days later, in the form of a court filing, and it was exactly the story he had built his witnesses for — only now he had to tell it without the ending he had needed me to provide.

The filing described me as emotionally unstable during pregnancy, irrational about the family’s finances, jealous, suspicious, unemployed, dependent, and prone to extreme overreactions.