Then his eyes moved down the line, unwilling and unable to stop — Ira, Abe, Romy, and last of all little Delphie holding my finger with her whole fist, and I watched the truth arrive in him not as a gasp but as a kind of collapse from the inside, the way a building comes down when a support is pulled: quietly, and then all at once, and then not standing at all.

He did not cry out.

He did not stagger.

He simply went very white and very still, a man doing math he did not want the answer to and getting it anyway.

“Mrs.

Lockridge—” he started, and then stopped, because he had called me by a name I had given back to the courthouse ten years ago, a small thing that told me he had not once, in all that time, thought of me as anything but a woman who used to belong to him.

“It’s Cadwell,” I said.