Four days earlier, Damian had stood in our hallway in a towel and told me that if I couldn’t understand how he felt about Valentina, we should divorce — had framed it as a grand and tragic love, a passion so real it justified everything, a connection I was too small to comprehend.

He had made me feel, for a few hours, as though I were the obstacle to something beautiful.

And now, in a conference room, the instant that love encountered a police report and a restitution claim, it evaporated so completely and so fast that it was almost comic.

He abandoned her mid-sentence.

He distanced himself from her like she was a bad smell. You brought stolen goods into my life — this to the woman he had, four days prior, chosen over his marriage.

There had never been a great love.