I sat on the sunlit patio with a warm mug of coffee, watching my two-year-old daughter run barefoot across the grass, chasing a bright yellow butterfly with her arms outstretched and her whole body shaking with laughter.

Martin Shaw walked out onto the deck and handed me a thin folder: the final decree of dissolution.

“Everything is signed and filed, Nora,” he said, and for once there was a warm, genuine smile on the humorless man’s face.

“You are officially free.” I looked down at the documents, and then out at the lawn where my daughter was reaching toward the warm sky, and I thought about the two notes I had once smoothed flat on a table in a Phuket airport lounge.

For years, Julian and Evelyn had treated me as a helpless addition to their family, someone fragile and isolated and easily discarded the moment I stopped serving their interests.