“He didn’t even ask him to do it.”

“No. He didn’t have to. That’s what men like your ex-husband buy with twenty years of Saturdays.”

She slid the printout into a folder. “And it is going to be extremely difficult for Mr. Vance to explain at deposition, because the honest answer makes him look like a man who ended a woman’s livelihood as a courtesy.”

That night I lay awake and thought about the fourteen hours, and about the word unspecified, and about how, for two entire years, I had assumed that the thing that destroyed me must have been at least as large as the destruction.

It hadn’t been. It had been the size of a paper clip.

That was somehow worse, and I couldn’t have told you why.