My daughters stayed safe in Boston with my sister, far from all of it.

And I want to be precise about the woman who walked into that executive boardroom, because she was not the woman who had walked down the courthouse steps a few weeks earlier.

I did not return as a betrayed wife, come to weep or plead or ask for what was fair.

I returned as the primary controlling shareholder of Vance Fine Furniture, come to take back a company that had been mine all along.

The boardroom, when I stepped into it, hit me with a wave of unbearable familiarity.

For sixteen years this had been my second home — the smell of fresh-sawn oak, the hum of the machines below, the offices where I had worked through four pregnancies.