My divorce was, by the end, the smallest of the legal machines grinding through my life, and in some ways the most satisfying, because it was the one that was simply, cleanly mine.

A man under federal indictment for defrauding and drugging his wife does not have much leverage in a divorce, and Sennett’s lawyers, competent to the last, advised him to sign.

I did not fight for money; most of what there was had turned to evidence anyway.

I fought for the clean severance — the total, documented end of him — and I got it.

The day the decree was final, I did not feel triumphant.

I felt the specific, quiet relief of a person who has finally set down a weight she’d carried so long she’d forgotten it wasn’t part of her body.