His power had never been his own, not really; it had been borrowed from the money, from the image, from the fear he could put into a room.

Strip those away and what remained, across a conference table in a lawyer’s office, was a diminished man signing papers he did not want to sign, and I felt, looking at him that last time, not triumph and not even anger, but a kind of distant astonishment that I had ever been afraid of him at all.

I was granted full legal and physical custody of Lily.

That was the only term I truly cared about, and no one contested it.