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.

I ate dinner across a table from that man about a hundred and forty times knowing exactly where he had been.

I sat on a sofa with his mother in the October choosing a paint colour for a nursery in a house I already knew we would not be living in.

There was a baby shower in the November. Thirty-one women. Adelaide gave a speech about welcoming me into the family properly at last, and everybody said how lovely, and I have the photographs and my face in them is completely normal.

Beatrix asked me at one point whether I could keep it up.

I said yes, and then I said the true thing, which was that it was not difficult, and that this was the part frightening me.

Because I had been doing a smaller version of it for two years already. Not confronting. Not asking twice. Letting a warm explanation sit where a straight answer should have been.