Without my money underneath it and without the great stone house to hold it up, the marriage turned out to have been built on almost nothing at all — on shared lifestyle, on shared status, on the pleasing of a life neither of them had actually earned.

When the lifestyle and the status and the house were gone, there was very little left between my son and his wife to keep them together, and she discovered it first.

She filed for divorce, bitter to the end, not over any betrayal of the heart but over the loss of the wealth and the standing she had married him to secure.

She had wanted the life.