And not only against me.

That was the part that changed the work from vengeance into something larger.

As I traced the administrator’s payments backward through the years, I found the others — dozens of them, names in a ledger, women and a few men who had been assigned a manufactured brokenness so that a spouse could win a settlement or dissolve a marriage on favorable terms or simply be spared the inconvenience of the truth.

Most of them, I was certain, had no idea.

They were out in the world somewhere right now, believing the story they’d been sold about their own bodies, apologizing to people who didn’t deserve an apology, grieving children they’d been told they couldn’t have.

I had been one of them a month ago.