There was no document served over the open grave.

That is not how these things actually end, and I had stopped, somewhere in ten years of raising children on my own, needing the ending to be a spectacle.

I understand the appeal of the spectacle; for years I fed on it, privately — the fantasy of the perfect public ruin, the handcuffs at the party, the villain dragged away shrieking while a crowd I imagined into being turned against her.

It got me through some hard nights.