Whatever she had been to me before that night, she became, in that moment and permanently, only a defendant.

People have asked me, since, whether it was hard — whether watching that footage and feeling my marriage die in real time was the worst moment of it.

And the honest answer surprises them, and it surprised me.

It was not hard, in the way they mean.

It was clean.

What died, watching that recording, was not really a marriage, because I understood, sitting there in the dark, that the marriage had been dead for a long time and I had only not been shown the death certificate.