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.

PART 1 — EVERYONE'S HERE

I was three days out of a cesarean and I had been upright for about eleven minutes when the door went.

Kelvin Memorial puts you in a wheelchair to leave, even if you can walk, and I was in one in the family room down the corridor because a nurse had told me there were people asking for me and had asked whether I wanted to see them.

I said yes. I want that in the record, because I did.

Caspian came in first.

Behind him was Marisol Quade in a cream dress, at eleven in the morning, in a maternity unit.

And then the rest of them. His mother. His father. Both sisters. Two aunts, three cousins, an uncle, and a woman I have never been able to place.

Twenty-two people. I counted afterward off the camera.

Nobody asked how I was. Nobody asked about the boys, who were four doors down with a nurse called Ottilie because the family room is not a place you take two three-day-olds.

They came into that room and arranged themselves around a wheelchair the way people arrange themselves at a closing.

Caspian put a leather folder down on the table.

"It's a fair number," he said. "Two hundred thousand, today. You sign the dissolution, you relinquish legal and physical custody of the boys, and you go."

Marisol's mouth did something when he said the word boys.

Adelaide Thackery came round to the side of my chair, took my handbag off my lap, and put the folder there instead.

And she said, to a room of twenty-two:

"Give me that. The boys need the Thackery name and a stable home, not a bitter woman. Sign it. Everyone's here."

Nobody said one word.

His sister Odile was four feet away and looked at the window. The uncle by the door had his hands folded like a man at a graveside.

There was a nurse at the corridor end of that room who had come in behind them and had not left, and a social worker called Deshawn Pryor standing just inside the doorway with a lanyard on, who had been assigned to me on the second day for reasons that had nothing to do with any of this and who did not move.

And there is a camera in that room, in the corner by the ceiling, because it is a hospital.