Vanessa turned her water bottle around on the table.

“I’ve had a lot of time,” she said. “Five years is a lot of time. I’ve thought about that gala more than any other night of my life, and I want to say one thing and then I’ll shut up, and you don’t have to say anything back.

“You think I didn’t know what I was?” She looked up. “I knew exactly what I was. I was thirty-seven and I’d been a temp for eleven years and a man with a firm and a house gave me a title and a bracelet, and I knew what the title was, and I took it.

I’m not asking you to feel bad about that.”

“Then what.”

“The mortgage was real.”