He thought that terror would hold me even after I found the burnt page, even after the divorce, even in that courtroom.

He thought a woman who had been abandoned once would sign away everything rather than be abandoned again.

He had built his entire plan on the assumption that my loneliness made me manageable.

He had never once considered that the same history that made me easy to cage had also made me the single most patient, most enduring, hardest-to-break person in that room — because I had survived eighteen years of people deciding my fate, and I was still here, and I had learned, in all those years of having nothing, exactly how much a person can lose and go on.

Something turned over behind his eyes then — the full understanding that he had lost all of it, the money and the freedom and the name — and he lunged.

He did not get far.