The courtroom handles the crime.

The betrayal — the specific vertigo of learning that the person who brought you coffee every morning was the person poisoning it — that you carry to a different kind of professional, and you work on it slowly, and some days it still finds you.

I learned to separate the grief for the marriage I’d thought I had from the man who had counterfeited it.

That surgery took longer than all the trials combined.

The therapist, a steady woman who never once flinched at anything I told her, said something early on that became the handrail I held for the whole first year.

I had asked her how I was supposed to trust my own judgment ever again, when the evidence was that I had loved a man for years without seeing what he was.