Three days after my twin sons were born, my husband brought twenty-two members of his family into a hospital room and offered me two hundred thousand dollars to sign away my marriage, my children, and my right to ever ask about their company's accounts. They expected me to cry. I read every page and signed all of them.

And then Beatrix told me to do nothing.

That is the part that mattered and it is the hardest thing anybody has ever asked me to do.

She said: you are six months pregnant, you live in a house owned by his family, you are employed by his mother, and you have no income of your own. If you file anything now, you will be out of that house inside a week, and they will spend the next two years telling a court that you are unstable and vindictive, and you will be fighting a custody case from a rented room.

She said: have your babies.

So I had my babies.

I want to describe those six months properly, because "she prepared" sounds like competence and most of it was not.

I lived in that house. Caspian was there four nights a week and at Marisol's the other three, and the cover story was a project in the north of the county, and I had known since the June and I said nothing.