The fifty-hour train ride was the plan.

They intended to put enormous physical strain on me, a pregnant woman, in the cold, standing, for two days, in the hope that it would either endanger the pregnancy or break my spirit badly enough that I would simply agree to a quiet divorce and disappear.”

I said it once, plainly, and I did not dwell on it, because it was a thing too dark to hold in the mouth for long, the knowledge that the man I had married had been willing to risk the child I had spent fifteen years longing for, in order to make his own life more convenient.

That was the true horror beneath the humiliation of the train, and I let it land in that foyer in a single sentence and then moved past it, because the point was not the darkness of what they had planned.