By the time my husband graduated from medical school I had spent eight years paying for it. On the lawn afterward his mother took the flowers out of my hands, he pushed an envelope into them, and I opened it standing in front of eighty people.

There it was.

Not a document protecting me. A document protecting them from me.

“You played me.”

“I was trying to protect you too.”

“Maybe,” I said. “You made sure to do yourself first.”

He sat there on that bed with his legs gone.

“I was scared.”

“I know you were.”

That is the part I have never been able to put down. He was scared. If he had done it out of cruelty I could have hated him cleanly and been finished in a month.

But that is who Teo Vantrease is when pressure closes on him. He gets smaller, and meaner, and he cuts away whatever is exposing him.

Even me.

Especially me, because I was the largest exposed thing he had.

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PART 4 — WHAT THE COMPLAINT ACTUALLY SAID

I got a lawyer on the Monday. Mabel Strand, forty-one, who does family and some employment, and who listened to the whole thing and then asked me one question that nobody else had asked.