The instinct in that moment, the human instinct, was to go find Marius and hold the folder up and demand to know how he could do this.

And I understood, with the cold clarity the folder had given me, that a confrontation was the single most dangerous thing I could do.

Because the petition wasn’t finished.

It needed a judge’s signature it did not yet have, which meant it needed me to behave, in the interim, exactly as the document described — erratic, accusatory, unstable — so that when I inevitably confronted him, my fury would become Exhibit B.

He had built a trap whose trigger was my own reaction.

The only way to disarm it was to refuse to react at all.