And so I realized that the single most devastating thing I could do — more devastating than any confrontation, any scene, any scream — was to deny him that woman entirely.

To go cold.

To go quiet.

To become, for a few hours, unreadable and unreachable and utterly composed, and to spend those hours not falling apart but assembling: an attorney, an affidavit, the footage, the plan.

He was waiting at home for a hurricane he knew how to survive.

I was going to send him, instead, a court order, which he did not.

My grief was real and it was enormous and I have paid it out slowly in the months since, in private, where it belonged.