I had married a man who did not know the difference between a family and a facade — and I had not known, until that corridor, that he had been guarding the facade the entire time, with our daughter and me merely furniture arranged inside it.

Chapter 5 — Interior Upholstery Cleaning

And then, standing in that corridor with a settlement agreement in front of me, I remembered two things, and they arranged themselves against each other in a way that made my skin go cold.

The first was a bank notification I had glanced at the night before and thought nothing of.

Luke had transferred three hundred and fifty dollars to Camellia’s personal account.

The memo line had read, simply: Interior upholstery cleaning.