He does not control whether you step into the frame he has built for you, or stand, quietly, just outside it, and let it hang there empty.

Brandon had spent years and considerable cunning building a trap of enormous sophistication.

And it was defeated, in the end, not by a lawyer or a judge or a recording, though all of those came after and mattered.

It was defeated in the first thirty seconds, at a dinner table, by a pregnant woman who looked at the man dismantling her life and said, in a perfectly even voice, that it was an interesting decision — and thereby declined, once and for all, to be the last necessary part of her own destruction.

Chapter 20 — A Life That Belonged to Me

The divorce was finalized, in the end, after months of detailed negotiation, through a court-approved settlement reached once every disputed transfer had been examined by people who knew how to examine them.