He had come only to sit, he’d told me — not to speak, not to loom, just to be a still point in the room I could feel at my back.

Cassian mistook the silence for weakness, the way men like him always do, reading every quiet as a surrender.

Emboldened, he demanded the house, my retirement account, and repayment for six years of fertility treatment, as though he were the wronged party billing me for damages.

In the hallway afterward, he lowered his voice to the register he’d used on me for years, the confidential one, the one that used to make me feel chosen.

“Drop the investigation,” he said.

“Or I’ll tell everyone you moved in with the first lonely man who opened his door.