I let my lawyer husband call my father after he mocked me on the kitchen floor, unaware he was dialing the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

David spent exactly twenty-two hours in jail.

Twenty-two hours of sharing a cell with a guy who had beaten up his own mother, of cold bologna sandwiches, of the smell of urine and fear, of listening to the guards whisper to each other about who he was and who he had messed with. His law firm sent over a bail bondsman at nine a.m. the day after Christmas—probably the last favor they would ever do him—and he walked out into the gray afternoon light, disheveled, his suit wrinkled, his eyes red-rimmed, expecting to find his life waiting for him just like he left it.

He was wrong.

His car was gone from the impound lot—repossessed, the bank said, because his paycheck had bounced now that he was fired. His credit cards were declined when he tried to buy a coffee. When he finally managed to get an Uber to take him to his nice suburban house, the one with the two-car garage and the little flag by the mailbox, he found a bright yellow sign nailed to the front door: NO TRESPASSING. PROPERTY OF THE ESTATE OF ANNA GRAYSON.

The locks had been changed.

He banged on the door for ten minutes, screaming about his rights, screaming that this was his house, until a process server stepped out from behind the bush by the porch and handed him a stack of papers so thick it made his arms ache. Divorce papers. Restraining orders. Civil lawsuits. Criminal charges. A formal complaint from the Bar Association.

David stood on his own front lawn in his wrinkled suit, papers spilling out of his arms onto the frozen grass, and he screamed until his throat was raw.

Sylvia wasn’t doing much better. She had been released an hour before him, bailed out by her sister, and she had gone straight to her bridge club meeting at the country club, fully expecting to be greeted with sympathy and outrage. Instead, the moment she walked through the door, the room went dead silent. Her best friend Marnie got up and moved to another table. The club manager came over, polite as could be, and informed her that her membership had been revoked—effective immediately—due to “conduct unbecoming a member.” The pastor of her church called her that evening to say he would not be able to attend her annual New Year’s Eve party, and that, actually, perhaps it would be best if she found another place of worship.

By the time David stumbled into the small, cheap motel room they had been forced to rent—sixty dollars a night, cigarette burns in the sheets, a TV that only got three channels—Sylvia was already three glasses of wine deep, sitting on the edge of the bed, red-faced and furious.

“This is all your fault!” she shrieked the second he walked through the door. She threw a wine glass at his head. He ducked, and it shattered against the wall behind him. “You told me she was an orphan! You told me she had nobody! You told me we could walk all over her and there would be no consequences! Look at us! Look where we are! We’re living in a dump! I haven’t even got my good hair dryer!”

David slammed the door. He threw the stack of papers onto the rickety table by the window. They slid off and scattered across the floor. “My fault?” he yelled back. He was shaking. His whole body was vibrating with rage and fear and the terrible, humiliating knowledge that he had destroyed everything he had ever worked for in one single, stupid night. “You’re the one who pushed her! You’re the one who had to make her cook dinner! You’re the one who couldn’t keep your mouth shut for five minutes! I had it all, Mom! I was going to make partner! I was on track to be a judge! And you threw it all away because you couldn’t stand the thought of her sitting down for five seconds!”

“Me?” Sylvia screeched. She stood up, swaying a little. “I did it for you! Someone had to put her in her place! She was getting above herself! Pregnant with your baby, acting like she owned the place! If you had been half a man, you would have put her in her place years ago instead of letting me do your dirty work!”

That shut him up.

David stared at her. For the first time in his life, he really looked at his mother. At the tight, bitter lines around her mouth. At the way she had always used him as a weapon, as an extension of her own ego, as the thing she could show off to her friends. At the fact that she had never once, in thirty-four years, ever asked him what he actually wanted. She had just told him. And he had obeyed. Like a good little boy.

And now it was all gone.

He sank down onto the edge of the other bed, his head in his hands. “We have to fight this,” he said, his voice muffled. “We can’t just roll over. I know the law. I know how these things work. It’s her word against ours. We can say she fell. We can say she was unstable. We can say she made it all up because she was mad about something—”

“David.” Sylvia’s voice had gone cold. She poured herself another glass of wine. “There were eight witnesses. Eight. Every single one of your little lawyer friends. And they all talked. Do you think the Chief Justice didn’t make sure they talked? They’re all saying the same thing. They saw me push her. They saw you throw the phone. They heard every word.” She took a long sip. “We are screwed. And you know it.”

The room went quiet. The hum of the heater was the only sound. David thought about his life. The nice house. The nice car. The respect. The deference. All of it, built on a foundation of sand, washed away in one single phone call. He thought about Anna. Quiet, sweet Anna, who had cooked his meals and washed his clothes and never complained, who he had always thought was so weak, so easy to control. He thought about the look in her eyes when she told him to call her father. He thought about the Chief Justice’s voice on the phone.

He started to laugh. A low, desperate, hysterical sound that bubbled up out of his chest and wouldn’t stop. “She played me,” he said, laughing until tears ran down his face. “Three years. Three whole years. She played me like a fiddle. She let me think I was the big man. She let me think I was winning. And the whole time… the whole time she was just waiting. Waiting for me to make a mistake big enough that she could crush me.” He looked up at his mother, his eyes wild. “She didn’t just want a divorce, Mom. She wanted to destroy us. And she’s doing it. And we can’t stop her.”

Sylvia’s face twisted. She threw her empty wine glass across the room. “Then we destroy her right back!” she snarled. “If we’re going down, we’re taking her with us. We go to the press. We tell them she’s a liar. We tell them she trapped you. We tell them she hid her identity to manipulate you. We make her look like the villain. The Chief Justice can’t control everything. People hate rich, powerful people getting their way. We can make the public on our side!”

For a second, David’s eyes lit up. A flicker of hope. It was a long shot. It was a desperate, dirty, terrible plan. But it was the only one he had left.

He stood up. He walked over to the table and grabbed his phone—the cheap burner he had bought at the gas station, since his old one was still evidence in a police bag. He scrolled through his contacts until he found the name he was looking for: GINA REED, CHANNEL 7 NEWS. She was a reporter who had been sniffing around his firm for months, looking for a scandal. She would love this.

He hit dial.

It rang twice. Then a sharp, hungry voice answered: “Reed here.”

“Gina,” David said. He put on his best lawyer voice—the one that sounded wounded, sincere, honest. “David Hale. I have a story for you. The biggest one you’ll ever run. It’s about the Chief Justice. And his daughter. And how they just destroyed my life for no reason.”

On the other end of the line, he heard a pen scratching furiously across a notebook.

“I’m listening,” Gina Reed said.

David smiled. It was a cold, ugly smile.

The gloves were off.