It was not confidence, exactly.

It was closer to the opposite.

For three weeks I had been certain of nothing at all.

Grief had taken every solid thing in my life and turned it to fog; I could not have told you what day it was, or whether I’d eaten, or how I’d gotten from one room to another.

But the deed was not a feeling.

The deed was a fact, filed in a county office, with my name printed on it in ink, and facts do not care whether you are grieving.

That was the thing I clung to on the concrete, and it turned out to be the exact thing my whole ordeal would come down to: that in a world where my father could take almost everything from me — my composure, my safety, very nearly my child — there were a handful of plain recorded facts he could not touch no matter how loudly he insisted otherwise.

I did not know yet how many of those facts my husband had quietly left me.

I only knew there was one, and that one was enough to stand on.

Chapter 2 — One Phone Call

My hands were shaking so hard I could barely work the phone.

But my mind, for the first time in three weeks of fog, had gone perfectly clear and cold.

I did not call for an ambulance first.

I know how that sounds.