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.

But it started with me. It was always going to have my name in it, because my name was the reason it existed.

He knew that. Pruitt knew that. Rosanne knew that.

And the advice they took was not “get her a lawyer.” It was “cut her loose before she finds out she’s the one being looked at, and make sure the paperwork is signed while she still thinks he’s the one in trouble.”

If I had signed on that lawn, I would have signed away every claim I had while under an active review that I did not know existed, represented by nobody, on the strength of a story about how it was for my benefit.

Mabel Strand said, and I have quoted her since, “Genevieve, the fastest way to make a person sign something is to make them believe they are being rescued.”

The rest was records, and I had them.