My husband had twins with my best friend and told me he finally had the family I could never give him. I signed the divorce papers without arguing — and then his mother answered my message with one sentence that told me the divorce wasn’t the end of anything.

She said, “Because right now you’re a wronged ex-wife with a clean file. The second you start steering it, you’re something else.”

So I did nothing for nine days, which was the hardest professional discipline I have ever exercised in my life.

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PART 2 — SOME WOMEN

I met Emory Kessler when I was twenty-five, at a conference, and he was the most interesting man in a room of dull ones.

I was in corporate finance. I was good at it. I was the person my firm sent when a set of books did not make sense, and the reason I was good at it is unromantic: I have an extremely high tolerance for reading the same page nine times.