What she did instead — I heard the heels — was walk away and go back into the room, and leave a seventy-year-old woman standing alone next to a coat rail.

And I stood in a pantry and understood something that took me another four months to be able to say out loud.

The woman I had spent three hours constructing as my enemy had just defended me twice in ninety seconds, to my mother-in-law, without knowing I existed as anything other than a name.

And my husband had not done it once in nine years.

Part Ten: Mason Came After All