On the courthouse steps, a reporter shouted whether Adaira felt she had won.

She looked down at Sam, and then back up.

“I didn’t win,” she said.

“I survived.

And sometimes surviving is much harder than winning.” It ran on front pages across the country the next morning.

Six months later she reopened her practice — not in the cold glass tower where Chandler had forged his documents, but in a warm brick building with hardwood floors and ferns in the entry and a consultation room where people facing abuse, financial or otherwise, felt heard rather than interrogated.