Once a judge signed it, Marius would gain unilateral control over all my assets, including Ardent IP and the algorithms.

He was not planning to divorce me.

He was planning to erase my legal personhood entirely, so that he could take my father’s life’s work without the inconvenience of my consent.

I read it twice.

Then I put it back exactly as I’d found it, and I closed the safe, and I went downstairs to smile beside him, because the woman he thought he was managing did not yet exist, and I needed her to stay hidden a little longer.

Standing at that safe, I understood something that I think saved me — the same thing, I would realize later, that had saved my father his whole quiet career.