I laughed, and found that my eyes had gone hot.

“She’d have told me I was showing off,” I said.

“You were,” he said.

“A little.

You’d earned it.”

Chapter 15 — The Machinery of the Law

The divorce petition was filed on Monday morning.

There was not, in the end, a great deal to fight over, because my mother’s single sentence — keep the firm in your name — had long ago decided the only question that mattered.