The months that followed were as grueling as the attorney had promised.

Joe’s legal team went to work on me the way these teams do, trying to build a woman who did not exist — a bitter, vindictive wife who had turned a child against his father, who had never held a real job, who had lived off the Vance name and now wanted to loot it, whose shares belonged in a family trust where she couldn’t touch them.

Never held a real job. That one burned, so I did the useful thing with the burn: I turned it into evidence.

Ten years of investor summits I had organized.