The divorce finalized in October. Emmett did not contest anything. He called me in August, and I answered, which was the mistake. He told me his parents had presented the rent demand to him the night before, in that private meeting, as a test of loyalty. He said he knew in the first minute that he was going to fail it. Then he asked whether I would have stayed if he had said no to them in the kitchen. I said yes without thinking, and I heard him start to cry, and I hung up on a grown man crying because I could not carry that and drive at the same time.

I still have the kitchen. Photographs of it, anyway. Someone else cooks in it now, someone who pays the Thornes twenty-one hundred a month, which is seven hundred more than they ever asked me for.

I live in my condo. It is paid off, it is quiet, and nobody has ever handed me a letter across the counter. But I learned something I did not want to learn at thirty-five: being right is not a strategy, and the law does not care how badly you were treated. It only cares what you can prove you are owed. Everything else, you carry yourself.