“Everything else was removed under a court-approved asset-preservation order.”

I was two miles away in a velvet armchair, watching none of this — the living room had no camera; I only had the foyer audio and, later, the office footage — but I did not need to see it to know exactly how the light fell in that empty room, because I had chosen the emptiness.

For five years that apartment had been the stage set of a marriage: the art I had bought and Ian had taken credit for to his friends, the piano no one played that Regan admired at parties, the long table where I had cooked Thanksgiving dinners for a family that was quietly robbing me between courses.

Every object in it had been a small lie I had told myself about the life I was living.

And now it was all gone, carried out in daylight under a court order, and what remained was the truth of the thing rendered in architecture: an enormous, expensive emptiness, and in the center of it, a single cardboard box holding the entire sum of what my husband had actually brought to our life together.

Not the piano.