A man like Fenwick, Ramsey said, does not experience a custody case as a dispute to be resolved.

He experiences it as a challenge to his ownership — of his children, of the narrative, of the version of himself the world was supposed to keep believing.

For two years Pilar had been slowly, lawfully proving that the admired doctor and the man behind his own front door were not the same person, and every inch of ground she gained had been, to him, not a legal setback but an intolerable act of theft.

The control that had ruled the marriage could not rule the courtroom; the family court did not care how charming he was, only what the evidence showed.

And so a man who had spent his whole life getting his way by force of personality found himself, for the first time, losing to a process he could not flatter or intimidate — and rather than accept it, he had gone looking for a way to blow the process up.

The tragedy of it, Ramsey said, was numbingly common in its logic even as it was monstrous in its particulars: he would rather harm his own child than lose an argument.