He was not asking whether my feelings were hurt.

He was establishing the legal and corporate frame, the frame in which what had happened to me was not a domestic dispute at all.

“Yes,” I said.

“That is what I am telling you.”

Chapter 8 — A Federal Crime

“Then let me tell you what your husband has actually done,” Martin said, “as opposed to what he thinks he has done.”

“He thinks,” Martin continued, “that he has stranded an isolated, powerless orphan at a beach resort, a woman with no family and no recourse, who will spend the next several weeks weeping and begging embassy clerks for help while he does whatever he intends to do back home.