I made lists.

I gathered documents from the file box in the closet, the deeds and the statements and the policy declarations, and I laid them out on the dining table after the children were asleep and I went through them one by one, methodical, unhurried, a woman doing her taxes, a woman balancing a checkbook.

There was no drama in it.

That was the gift of it.

Nathan’s plan had been a thing of performance and manipulation and charm, three years of theater — and I was defeating it not with a bigger performance but with the least dramatic tools in the world: paperwork, phone calls, the patient reading of fine print, the quiet correct filing of the right forms with the right offices.