I had thought a great deal, in the days before, about whether to go at all.

My lawyer had advised against it.

My studio manager had begged me not to.

Every reasonable person in my life told me that walking into a room designed to humiliate me was handing my ex-husband exactly the afternoon he wanted, that the dignified thing was to decline and let him wonder.

And they were right, by every ordinary measure.

But there was a calculation they couldn’t see, because they didn’t know what was in the car with me.

Grayson had built his whole invitation on a single false belief — that I was still the woman he’d left, and that my children did not exist.