Daniel and Adrian arrived within twenty minutes of each other, and we spent three hours at
my kitchen table going through every page of the dissolution contract while Ethan slept in
the next room, completely unaware that the ground was shifting again.
By the time they left it was past midnight and the contract was in the investigators’ hands
and I was sitting alone in my kitchen with the particular exhaustion that comes not from work
but from having understood something fully for the first time.
My name had been in that document before I made a single decision.
I went to bed. I didn’t sleep much.
Adrian called the next morning, not about the contract, not about the investigators, not about
any of the machinery currently grinding toward its conclusion. He called and said, very simp
