This was something else.

This was a man who had sat in rooms and planned, coldly, to take everything I had and everyone I loved, and to use my own devotion to my patients as the weapon that would take my child.

That is not heartbreak.

That is a threat.

And you do not grieve a threat.

You neutralize it.

There was one more thing in what I overheard, a small phrase that Julian tossed off without weight, and it lodged in me and would not leave: her father’s attorneys. My father.

My father, who had died three years before, and who had never, in all the years of my marriage, quite warmed to Julian.