The lie about my body, I would answer with the simple fact of her.

But she herself would be kept clean of all of it, held apart, loved for nothing but herself.

That was the one boundary I would not trade for any victory, and keeping it was, in the end, the victory that mattered most.

And so I did a strange double thing in those seven weeks between the phone call and the wedding: I learned to be a mother, sleeping in two-hour pieces, learning her cries apart from one another, holding her against my shoulder in the dark — and at the same time, in the hours she slept, I signed affidavits, and reviewed audits, and built, with Naomi, the quiet lawful machine that was going to give my grandmother’s estate back.

Chapter 12 — Proper Channels