I was past that.

What I felt was closer to the calm of a surgeon, or a woman balancing her own books after a long avoidance: this account is closed, that one needs settling, this instrument goes here.

I had run a company for twenty years.

I knew how to act deliberately while my hands still shook, and my hands were shaking, from the pain and the adrenaline and the strange grief of watching a marriage die on a hospital tray.

I made the calls anyway, one at a time, in a low even voice, because the woman I had buried to keep the peace turned out to be right there under the surface the whole time, fully intact, and all it took to wake her was a man telling her that her broken leg was an inconvenience to his mother’s dinner.

The first was to the man who managed my private accounts.