She was reacting like an investor who has just discovered a catastrophic undisclosed liability on the balance sheet of a company she owns.

Her horror was not moral; it was financial and social.

She was not wounded that I had abandoned two babies — she was calculating, even now, even in her panic, what the revelation would cost her in status, in stock, in the pitying whispers of the board wives.

And I understood, watching her calculate, that we deserved each other precisely and completely: two people who had married as a transaction and had never, in all our years, become anything more, and who were now, fittingly, dissolving as a transaction too, with lawyers and divestments and no grief on either side.

There was a certain awful symmetry to it.