Dalton’s lowest moment, the one I think he will replay for the rest of his life, came at the mediation.

He arrived with three lawyers and an air of a man still expecting to manage the room, and he offered Catalina a small settlement in exchange for her silence — a modest sum and a nondisclosure agreement, the standard instrument for making an inconvenient woman disappear quietly.

He expected her to take it.

He expected her to be grateful and frightened, the way she had always been.

Instead she sat beside me in a cream jacket with one hand resting on the curve of her stomach, and when his lawyer finished, I said, “My client rejects the offer.” Dalton’s face tightened.

“Without me,” he said to her, low, the old threat reflexive even now, “you have nothing.”