He was sentenced to eighteen months in a federal facility for financial fraud — not, in the end, for breaking my heart, which is no court’s business, but for the theft he’d built his whole double life around.

Victoria was fired, and made to return every gift he’d bought her with stolen money, my necklace among the first of them.

And full legal and physical custody of Leo was granted to me, uncontested, because a man being led away in handcuffs has very little standing to argue that a pediatric nurse is the unfit parent.

I did not celebrate any of it.

People expected me to, and I understood why, but the truth is that watching the father of your child be led out of a courtroom is not a victory anyone celebrates, whatever he did.