She had been hunting his living brother, through hired men, in order to guarantee his death, so that the fortune would flow cleanly to Daniel and, through the wedding, to her.

The woman he had planned to build his life beside had been, the entire time, engineering the murder of his brother.

What undid Daniel most, sitting with that understanding, was not the danger of it but the retroactive falsity — the way Vanessa’s guilt reached backward and hollowed out two years of memory.

Because he had loved her.

That was the thing he could not immediately absorb.

He had not been coerced or tricked into a loveless arrangement; he had genuinely, foolishly loved this woman, had chosen her, had imagined children with her and grown old with her and built, in his mind, an entire future.