Part 7

Anger becomes easier to carry when it has paperwork.

That was the first useful thing I learned in the weeks after the funeral.

The second was that there is no polite way to dismantle a marriage built around lies. People tell you to take care of yourself, to rest, to hydrate, to breathe. What they do not tell you is that divorce—real divorce, money-and-property-and-reputation divorce—is mostly spreadsheets, signatures, calendar invites, and finding out how many times one man can say “misunderstanding” before the word loses all contact with English.

I spent those weeks between Carmel and my lawyer’s office in Los Angeles. I slept at the cottage, woke to gulls and the smell of salt, then drove south for meetings where Blackwood and a forensic accountant named Priya unfolded my life into columns.

Grant had not been subtle so much as sheltered.