Chapter 1 — Running Home

Holding our two children’s hands, I ran up Maplewood Lane with my heart hammering so loudly I could barely hear eight-year-old Fiona asking why I was crying.

I wasn’t sad.

That was the thing she couldn’t understand, and that I couldn’t stop to explain, because I was running, and laughing, and crying all at once, five-year-old Leo’s small hand gripped tight in mine, the autumn afternoon bright and golden around us.

I wasn’t sad at all.

For the first time in eleven years, I was the opposite of sad.

I had just come from the office of Franklin and Meyers, where a silver-haired attorney had sat me down across a wide mahogany table and told me, gently, that my late aunt, Margaret Sterling, had left me a great deal.

Twenty-four million dollars.

Majority ownership of Sterling Tower, a commercial high-rise in Manhattan.

And the legal title to the house I had been living in for eleven years, the house on Maplewood Lane, the house my husband, Luca, had always, always called his.

I had sat in that attorney’s office and listened, and slowly understood, and then I had gathered my children from their after-school program and run for home, because there was only one thing I wanted to do with the news, and it was to tell my husband.

I imagined his stunned face.

I imagined his arms around me.

I imagined our children laughing at the wonder of it, and every overdue bill and broken appliance and humiliating sacrifice of the last decade simply dissolving, because we were finally going to be all right.

That is what I was running home to.

I had no idea what was waiting for me on the porch.

Chapter 2 — What Aunt Margaret Left

I should say something about Aunt Margaret, because she is the invisible architect of everything that followed, and because I did not understand, until that day in the attorney’s office, how well she had known me, or how carefully she had planned.