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 did not cry.

I opened the folder and I read it.

All of it. Every page, in front of twenty-two people, for eleven minutes, while nobody spoke.

The dissolution was ordinary. The custody instrument was four pages of language that I recognised because I have read a lot of instruments.

And on page nine, under a heading about mutual releases, there was a clause that had nothing to do with a marriage.

It said I permanently waived any right to request, review, audit, or initiate any inquiry into the financial records of Thackery Row Holdings, including its client trust accounts, and that I released all claims arising from anything I might have seen in the course of my former employment.

Two hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money to a woman with two newborns and no job.

It is not a lot of money to buy that clause.

I looked up at Caspian.

"Are you certain this is what you want?"

"I've never been more certain in my life. Don't make it harder than it is. Sign."

I looked at the camera in the corner. Then at the nurse. Then at Deshawn Pryor in the doorway.

Then I looked at every one of the twenty-two people who had chosen to stand in that room.

I got a pen out of my bag and I signed every page.

The relief came off Caspian like heat. Marisol put her arm through his.

Adelaide leaned down close to my ear.

"We'll come in the morning. The boys belong with us now."

I looked at her and I did not say anything.

They filed out in about ninety seconds. Somebody held the door for Marisol.

The nurse — her name is Ottilie Brandt and I have sent her a card every year since — came over and crouched down in front of that wheelchair and said, "Are you all right?"

And I said, "Can you take me back to my boys."

I did not cry in that room and I did not cry in the corridor.

I cried at about half past two in the morning, in a hospital bed, with a feeding pillow across a nine-inch incision and one twin latched and the other one screaming in a cot eleven inches away, because I could not reach him and could not get up and had to press a button and wait.

That is the actual worst moment of this entire story and there is nobody in it but me.