The one person Nathan had never managed to isolate me from was Dr.

Natalie Brooks, because he had never understood how far back she went or how little she cared what he thought.

Natalie had been my roommate at Northwestern, twenty years and a whole lifetime ago, before she left the law-school track we’d started on together and became an emergency physician instead.

She was the one thread of my old life that Nathan’s careful campaign had failed to cut, mostly because she was immune to charm and he had never found a lever that worked on her.

We had lunch every few weeks — one of the few outings Nathan permitted, because a friendship with a busy doctor looked wholesome and gave his “concerned husband” story a witness.