My husband pushed me down the stairs, and as I lay shattered at the bottom, my mother-in-law called my father and said, “Come get your worthless daughter and take her back.” Dad gave her only one warning: “If she has so much as a scratch, your family will answer for it.” They laughed at him because they had absolutely no idea who my father truly was.

I had built entire conversations around a sentence that might never come.

“What if that’s what I need to feel finished?”

“Then he still has power over the ending of your story,” Gabriel said.

He was not being harsh.

He was offering a fact I had been avoiding.

The divorce itself involved painstaking work: separating marital assets, identifying outstanding debts, and making realistic arrangements for Lily.

The financial questions remained disputed, and not every suspicious invoice translated neatly into a remedy.

Gabriel refused to oversell the case.