And marital funds were used, substantially, to benefit an outside party.” She looked up.

“That last part isn’t just painful, Lourdes.

It’s actionable.

It has a name in the law, and the name is dissipation.”

I cannot describe what it did to me to hear my catastrophe translated into that flat, precise language.

For a full day I had been living inside pure feeling — betrayal, grief, humiliation, the vertigo of everything I’d believed turning out to be false.