It had a paper trail after all.

It had just never been read out loud before.

I watched Grant’s face while Rebecca did it. He had walked in expecting a shouting match — expecting me to be emotional, to overreach, to hand him the role of the reasonable one by losing my composure in front of a judge.

He had built his whole strategy on the version of me he’d spent ten years describing to other people.

But Rebecca didn’t raise her voice once. She just laid down paper, and let the paper talk, and there was nothing for his charm to push against.

I understood, watching him realize it, that this was the thing my family had never grasped either: that the woman they all kept calling hysterical had, the entire time, been keeping meticulous records of a life, because someone in that house had to, and it had always, only, been me.