Valentina’s head snapped toward him.

“You said she couldn’t touch that money.”

“Third,” Solene went on, unhurried, “we’ve turned over the building’s surveillance footage and an itemized report to the precinct regarding the removal of personal property from Lourdes’s home.” She set a still photograph on the table: Valentina in my hallway, my grandmother’s jewelry case in her hands.

I watched Damian’s face as the documents came across the table one by one, and it was an education in a certain kind of man.

He had walked in with a settlement draft and the easy confidence of someone who assumes the world will bend to a reasonable-sounding offer — let’s be adults, fifty-fifty, everyone moves on. He had assumed, I think, that I was still the woman he’d married, the one who smoothed things over, who could be managed with a calm voice and an appeal to being reasonable.

He did not yet understand that the woman across the table had spent the last week learning exactly what she was owed and exactly what he had done, and had hired someone whose entire job was to make sure the law agreed.