But the wife had, in that moment, been rendered temporarily inoperative by the sheer magnitude of the wound, and into the space where she had been stepped the other version of me, the professional, the one who had spent a career staying cold and clear in the middle of other people’s catastrophes.

And the analyst did not weep.

The analyst assessed.

In the ninety seconds between hearing that kiss and setting down the phone, some part of me had already begun, coldly, to work the problem: what is true, what can be proven, what are my assets, what are the risks, what is the sequence of actions that protects me and my daughter and gives this man the consequences he has earned.

I did not decide to be strategic.