Your complete, unbothered, final absence of anything to give them.

I looked at him being led toward that door, and I felt the pull of the last word, and I let it go, because withholding it was the truest thing I could do — the plain statement that he had already stopped being a person I spoke to.

The door closed behind him, and the room was quiet, and my mother reached up and put her cold hand over mine.

Chapter 14 — Four Hundred Thousand

The why of it came out over the following days, once my own lawyers ordered a forensic audit of the finances I had shared, apparently in name only, with my husband.

Ronan was drowning.