It had always been mine, entirely and legally and unassailably mine, and the fact that they had all spent two years acting as though I lived there on their sufferance did not change the reality recorded on a document downtown.

Ethan thought he had shut me out of my own life.

He had made a serious mistake, and it was the kind of mistake that a person only gets to make once, because I was not a woman who would stand in the rain and weep about it.

I was a woman who knew exactly what she owned, and exactly what to do about it.

And so, standing on the doorstep of the house I owned, locked out by the husband who had abandoned me, I stopped crying, and I made a phone call.