I only knew to keep them.

Because I had learned something, in my quiet career reading the documents other people signed without reading: that sometimes walking away is not surrender.

Sometimes walking away is simply declining to interrupt a man who is busy handing you enough rope.

This is the part of the story that people struggle with most, and I understand why, because it runs against every instinct that a betrayal is supposed to produce.

When you discover that your spouse has cheated on you and emptied your accounts and is preparing to discard you, every fiber of you wants to fight, to scream, to hire the most aggressive lawyer you can find and make him bleed for every dollar and every lie.