“No,” I said.

“This is your last chance to make this right.”

I meant it as a genuine chance, and this is the part Conrad never grasped, then or later.

The call was not a trap dressed as an offer.

If, in those five minutes, my husband had done the one decent thing still available to him — had brought the woman who assaulted me to face what she had done, had chosen, even once, even late, to stand on my side of the line — I would have let a great deal go.

Not the marriage; that was already ash.