And every moment of that love, he now had to understand, had been received by a person who felt nothing back — who had smiled at him across candlelit tables while calculating the timeline of his brother’s death, who had let him believe he was building a life while she was building a trap, whose every tender word had been a move in a game whose object was a fortune and whose price was a man’s murder.

It is a specific and disorienting horror to learn that a love you gave freely was received by someone incapable of returning it, that you poured genuine feeling into a vessel that was, the whole time, only measuring how much it could hold before the wedding.

Daniel would spend a long time afterward mistrusting his own judgment, wondering how he could have looked into that face for two years and seen warmth where there was only calculation.

And the answer, when he finally reached it, was the same answer that explained why he had never seen Maria: that he had been a man who looked at surfaces.