And about four years ago he came to my firm asking hypothetical questions — how you might contest a will, how you’d go about having an elderly relative declared incompetent.”

So it had not been drifting apart.

It had been surgery — the careful, deliberate excision of every person who might have looked at my life and told me what they saw.

He had not taken my friends by accident.

He had taken them because a woman with friends is a woman with mirrors, and he could not afford for me to see myself in anyone’s eyes but his.

Hearing Lenora’s voice on the phone after three years did something to me I hadn’t expected.