What is on this table is only whether Patricia walks out of this marriage free and safe today, or whether we do all of this the slow, public, criminal way.

Sign, and she is free tonight.

Refuse, and she is free anyway, eventually, after the marshals have finished with you.

Those are the options.

There is no third one.”

I watched that land on them, and I want to describe the particular silence that followed, because it taught me something about power that I have never forgotten.

All my life, until that room, I had understood power the way most people do — as force, as money, as the ability to make others afraid.

Arthur had that kind of power in abundance, and had wielded it over his family for thirty-two years.