The divorce papers were already drawn up and waiting on his desk before I ever walked into that room; I understood later that the ten minutes had never been a hearing, only a formality, a small cruelty dressed as fairness.

Felicia had told him a story — that she had gone to a hotel and seen me there, in a room, with another man — and she had told it so many times, so confidently, that by the time I stood in front of him, any doubt I tried to raise sounded to Garrett like an insult to his family.

I was newly, secretly pregnant.

I did not even tell him that day, because I could see in the first thirty seconds that it would not matter, that a man who had already signed the papers was not going to unsign them for a woman he had decided to stop believing.