After my husband died, Brock had taken total control of the ranch — fired the workers who’d been with us for years, grew possessive, began speaking to Natasha as though she were unpaid help rather than his wife.

One evening I had caught him gripping her arm, hard, simply because she had called her mother on the phone.

We had argued about it, bitterly.

And then I had done the thing I have had to forgive myself for slowly and incompletely ever since: I told myself it was not my place, that I was grieving and exhausted and that distance would be good for my health, and I got on a plane, and I left her there with him.

I did not cause what came after.