Chapter 22 — The Grief Underneath

There was a grief in all of it that the reckoning couldn’t touch, and I want to be honest about it, because a story that ends only in victory is a lie.

I had loved Sennett.

That was the part I had to sit with, in the long quiet after the indictments, in a therapist’s office twice a week for the better part of a year.

I had loved him, and the man I’d loved had never existed — he had been a performance staged for the benefit of the woman with the master key, and every tender morning, every steady hand over my shaking ones, had been a move in a game to take my mind apart.

You do not recover from that in a courtroom.