A handsome heir, a spark of conversation, a whirlwind courtship.

It had felt, at the time, like the most natural thing in the world.

But the word on that envelope reached back into that memory and turned it, subtly and horribly, on its axis, and made me wonder, for the first time, whether the most important meeting of my life had been an accident at all.

Because I remembered something I had filed away for eight years as a small, meaningless oddity.

When Alistair Abernathy first met me at that dinner and heard my last name, he had gone very still, and stared at me with an intense, unreadable curiosity, and asked a question that had seemed, at the time, like nothing.