I want to be honest about the calm, because people find it hard to believe.

It was not the calm of someone who didn’t care.

It was the calm of someone who had finally been handed proof of a thing she’d been gaslit out of believing for months, and who understood, with sudden total clarity, that her only job now was to be right.

For half a year I had doubted my own senses — had let Warner and, in her way, his mother convince me that the smell of unfamiliar perfume and the changed passcode and the vanished Sundays were the paranoid inventions of an insecure wife.

To find, at last, that I had not been crazy, that every instinct had been correct, did not make me want to weep.

It made me methodical.