Because a world in which a woman needs a fortune to be believed is a world that has already failed most women.

My money bought me a good ending.

It should not have had to.

That it did is not, in the end, a thing to celebrate.

It is a thing to work, for the rest of my life, to make untrue.

Some months after the divorce was final, a long handwritten letter arrived from Gavin’s prison cell.

I did not open it.

I handed it, sealed, to my attorney, and I kept walking, because some stories do not end when the guilty finally beg to be forgiven.