Her name was Diane.

Diane Marsh.

Her college roommate for two years.

The woman she had called her closest friend until the day she decided that friendship was no longer useful to her.

She hadn't seen Diane in four years.

Not since the wedding, where Diane had sat in the third row and cried during the vows, and she had assumed those were tears of happiness.

She was no longer sure about that.

"What is she doing here?" she said.

Her voice came out smaller than she intended.

Her husband — her ex-husband, she reminded herself, the papers were signed — looked at her without any of the apology she expected.

"Diane is my attorney," he said.

"She has been for the last two years."

The words landed one at a time.

"Your attorney."

"That's right."

She looked at Diane.

Diane looked back at her with an expression she could not read.

Not gloating.

Not guilty.

Something quieter and more final than either.

"You knew," she said to Diane.

"This whole time.

You knew what they were doing."

"I knew what you were doing," Diane said.

"There's a difference."

His mother stepped aside to let them both into the house.

She followed without deciding to.

Her legs simply moved.

The living room was the same as she remembered — clean lines, pale walls, a single shelf of framed photographs.

She had always found it cold.

Now it felt like a room that had been waiting for this exact moment.

Diane set a leather folder on the coffee table and opened it.

"We've been documenting your financial activity for eighteen months," she said.

"The transfers to your personal account.

The property you registered under your sister's name.

The investment account you opened six weeks after the wedding using funds from the joint account."

She stared at the papers.

Her own signature looked back at her from three separate pages.

"That was legal," she said.

"Some of it was," Diane said.

"Some of it wasn't."

Her ex-husband sat down in the chair across from her.

He didn't look angry.

That was the part she couldn't understand.

He looked like a man who had already finished grieving and moved on to something else entirely.

"I want to know one thing," he said.

"Just one.

Did you ever mean any of it?

Even at the beginning?"

The room was very quiet.

She opened her mouth.

Closed it.

"I thought so," he said.

Diane slid a single page across the table toward her.

"This is a formal notice of civil recovery proceedings.

You have thirty days to respond through your own legal counsel."

She picked up the page.

Her hand was steady.

She was proud of that, at least.

"You planned all of this," she said.

"The divorce, the asset transfer, bringing her here.

You planned every single piece of it."

"You planned first," his mother said from the doorway.

"We just planned better."

She stood up.

She picked up her bag.

She walked to the front door and put her hand on the handle.

"This isn't over," she said.

Nobody in the room argued with her.

Nobody agreed either.

She stepped outside.

The door closed behind her with a soft, certain click.

In her bag, her phone was already lighting up.

Her lawyer's name on the screen.

She didn't answer it yet.

She stood on the front step for a moment, looking at the driveway, at the two cars parked side by side, at the ordinary afternoon light falling across an ordinary street.

Then she answered the call.

"We have a problem," she said.