I had wondered, in the weeks leading up to that party, whether I would feel guilty at this moment — whether some old loyalty, some ghost of nine years of marriage, would rise up and make me want to soften it, to pull Daniel back, to spare the father of my child this public unraveling.

I did not.

And it is worth saying why, because it is not because I had become cruel.

It is because standing there watching Luke’s face go white, I understood that this moment was not something I was doing to him.

It was something he had done to himself, months and years earlier, in a hundred private decisions made in offices and on laptops, each one a choice to steal a little more, lie a little further, treat the people who trusted him as marks to be worked.

The pension fund he had raided belonged to real people — clerks and warehouse workers and assistants who would retire on less because of him.