The house in Brookline was mine.

That was the thing Gregor had said on the phone that he would “handle” — the small inconvenient fact that the three-story house he intended to give his mistress was deeded, wholly and solely, in my name, and had been for years, for tax reasons of his own devising that had seemed clever to him once and now were the ground I stood on.

I did not burn it down.

I want to say that, because there was a night, early on, when the thought moved through me like a fever — the pure animal wish to leave him nothing, to make ash of the thing he’d promised her — and I understand that wish, I am not going to pretend I am above it.

But I am a schoolteacher, and I spent thirty-four years teaching children that you do not get to break the thing you’re angry at, that there is a lawful, patient, harder way to protect what is yours, and I was not going to spend any of my last good months teaching myself the opposite.

So I did the harder thing.