He was a partner discussing his cut. Nine hundred thousand dollars, Samuel said to him, laughing, for every property transaction we close. And then Samuel added a sentence that took the floor out from under me: She wasn’t the first target, and she won’t be the last.

I set the phone down and stood very still in my parents’ kitchen.

Everything I had told myself, for one last desperate day, about my husband being a weak man trapped by a powerful father — all of it dissolved.

He had not been trapped.

He had been employed.

He had been paid, handsomely, for two years, to help do to other people exactly what had been done to me, and then he had helped do it to me, and had stood in that room, and had asked me to sign.

There was no innocent version of Christopher left to grieve.