Every check they sent, every single payment on that schedule, went straight into a high-yield trust account in Gemma’s own legal name.

All of it.

Every dollar.

It is hers, Nora.

She has full access to all of it whenever she needs it, for the rest of her life.

Every single penny of that money is hers, and it always was, from the very first check.” I stood over him, holding the contract, and I could not make the pieces fit, because a man who marries for money does not give every cent of it, secretly, to the woman he supposedly married for it.

I sat with that impossibility, turning it over, unable to make it fit the story I had been telling myself ten seconds earlier.