The deed was about protecting me if anything happened to him — wasn’t that what marriage was?

The policy was standard; his financial advisor had recommended it; didn’t I want Kai looked after?

The photographs were a favor.

That is how it is done, I understand now.

Not with one alarming demand but with a patient series of small, defensible ones, each dressed as love, each moving one more piece of my life into his hands, spaced far enough apart that no single one ever felt like a pattern.

I was a doctor.