And what he did not yet know — what neither of them knew — was that Solene had not stopped at the bank statements.

She had subpoenaed the hallway camera footage from the building’s management company.

She wanted to know how a woman who did not live in our building had been getting into our apartment.

And the footage, when it came back, answered a question I hadn’t even known to be the worst one.

I had said financial audit almost without thinking, but the phrase kept working on me after I hung up, because it named the shift that had happened in me and I think in the case itself.

Damian wanted this to be a domestic dispute — a messy, emotional, private matter of a marriage falling apart, the kind of thing that gets resolved with tears and recriminations and a fifty-fifty split and everyone agreeing to move on.