He wanted my inheritance — the trust my father had built, my father who had never fully trusted Julian and had structured things, thank God, to make them hard to take.

He wanted my home, the house where my son’s height was penciled on a doorframe.

And he wanted Leo — not because he loved him, I understood now, but because Leo was leverage, because a child is the one asset in a divorce that a certain kind of man knows will wound the mother most to lose.

That was the coldest part, colder even than the necklace, colder than Victoria in my robe.

He was willing to take my son away from me not out of any father’s love but as a tactic, and to build the case out of the very hours I spent healing sick children in a hospital.