I gave you seven years, and my trust, and my whole heart — that is the only reason this hurt at all.

But loving you never once made me yours.

And it was never, ever going to make me let you take my daughter’s future.”

I had written and rewritten those few sentences a dozen times in the weeks before the hearing, and thrown out every version that was longer, because I understood something about that room that Beckett never understood about any room: that the person with the least to prove speaks the fewest words.

He had spent his whole life performing — the humble architect, the devoted husband, the grieving man with the funeral lilies — and even at his own sentencing his lawyer was still performing for him, spinning the wicked mistress and the crushing debts, reaching for a story that might shave a few years off.