That woman had been, in her way, happy, or at least she had believed she was, and now I had to let her go, because she had been living inside a story that turned out not to be true.

Sarah, I think, understood this better than she let on.

She never rushed me.

She let the silences sit.

And when I signed the first of what would be many documents, she simply said, quietly, that I was doing the right thing, and that the hardest signature was always the first one, and she was right about that too.

Chapter 12 — Do You Have an Independent Income?

Sarah gave me a list of things to assemble: a complete inventory of our shared assets, the deeds, the trusts, the insurance policies, everything with both our names on it or that touched the money Julian had been moving.