There are laws against what Julian had done.

There are treaties.

There are agencies, and marshals, and procedures, and remedies.

The moment I stopped experiencing my situation as the worst day of my personal life and started experiencing it as an incident to be managed, an entire apparatus of response became available to me that had been invisible while I was drowning in the feeling of it.

This is not to say the feeling was not there; it was, underneath, the whole time, the grief of a marriage revealed as a lie.

But I set it aside, deliberately, to be felt later, when it was safe to feel it, and I picked up the professional frame instead, because the professional frame had a phone number in it, and the grief did not.