I watched Rupert do the arithmetic — three weeks ago — and understand that the trap had closed around him long before tonight, that on every day of the past three weeks when he had smiled at me across our kitchen and called me domestic, a court order with his name on it had already been sitting in a judge’s file.

He stared at me as though I had become a stranger.

In a sense, I had.

He had spent eight years married to the wife he’d invented, and he was meeting the actual one for the first time, on a stage, in front of everyone, and she was the last person on earth he wanted her to be.

“You couldn’t have,” he said, and it came out almost quietly.

“You don’t have the—”

“The standing?” I said.

“The authority?

The nerve for business?” I let the words sit there, his own words, handed back.

“I’ve had all of it the entire time, Rupert.