She reached up with shaking fingers and unclasped my mother’s pearl earrings, and she dropped them, right there, onto the porch floor, as though they had become suddenly hot, and she began backing away toward her car.

“I’m not getting dragged into a fraud investigation, Luca!” she said.

“Don’t call me!” “Chloe, wait!” Luca shouted, but she was already gone, already running down the driveway in her white dress and her heels, already climbing into her car, already reversing out into the street.

She did not look back either.

And I stood on the walkway of my own home and watched my husband’s mistress abandon him on the porch the very instant his fortune turned, and I felt something that was not quite satisfaction, but was close to it: the clean, clarifying recognition that the woman who had called me a leech had, in fact, been the leech all along, attached to Luca only for what she could draw from him, dropping off the moment the blood ran dry.

She had told me the truth about herself in a single word, and then demonstrated it, ten minutes later, at a dead run.