The gala went on.

I took the stage again, later, to announce that the evening’s new initiative — a housing and legal-aid program for women escaping financial and coercive abuse — would carry my grandmother’s name.

The Greenwich estate, I said, would be converted into a legal-aid center and a temporary sanctuary.

I watched the room absorb it, and I thought about the difference between the two things I had done that night: exposing a man, which anyone with the evidence could have done, and building something in the ruins, which was the only part that had ever actually mattered to me.

I had chosen the coercive-abuse program deliberately, and not only because it fit the gala’s theme.

I had chosen it because in the nine months I’d spent uncovering what Ferdinand was building, I had learned how many women it happens to, and how few of them own investment funds.