Two days later, Jason met with a family law attorney a co-worker at the dealership had recommended, and it was in that office that he began to understand that his situation was not merely bad.

It was, in the specific way that mattered, unwinnable — and it was unwinnable because of the one thing about me his whole family had always mocked.

They had called me cold.

Controlling.

Obsessed with money, with records, with keeping track. You love organizing things, Chloe had sneered across my own dinner table.

And it was true that I kept meticulous records — of everything, for years, out of the plain professional habit of a woman who balances accounts for a living.