Here is the thing Vaughan didn’t know, the thing that wasn’t in my leather folder because it was already living in an office in the Financial District.

Four days before the flight, I had sat across a desk from a divorce attorney named Vesna Thorpe — sharp, unhurried, the kind of lawyer who reads a bank statement the way I read a floor plan, seeing the load paths other people miss.

I had brought her everything: the investigator’s report, the photographs, and three years of our joint financial records.

A friend had given me her name years earlier, in the offhand way people pass along a good attorney, and I had written it in the back of a notebook and never expected to need it.

I called her the morning after I found the flight confirmation.

I have read enough now to know that the worst mistake a person in my position can make is to announce the divorce before the money is secured — that the gap between “I know” and “I’ve filed” is exactly when a cornered spouse empties accounts and covers tracks.