“My lawyer will send you the divorce papers in the morning.

You can keep the house.

You can keep the Hollis name — you’ve all paid enough to protect it.

I’m keeping the only thing that was ever really mine, which is my life.

I’m taking it back.” He said my name once more, but I had already turned.

I walked down the wet steps and did not look back at the house, and did not look back at him standing in the doorway of it, and got into my car, and drove out into the clean dark rain, leaving the Hollis family and their beautiful, rotten, carefully guarded secret behind me for good.

Six weeks later, Sarah Pruitt and I met for coffee, two women who had been made to feel alone in the same house by the same man, and were not alone anymore.