And she had used Andrew’s signatures — obtained through that investment — to help authorize the fraudulent loans that moved the laundered money.

Vanessa was not an ambitious woman who had stumbled, late, onto a family fortune and decided to seize it.

She had been connected to the scheme that ruined Andrew from the very beginning.

She had helped build the trap that drove Daniel’s brother into hiding, years before she ever smiled at Daniel across a room and let him believe he had found her by chance.

Their entire romance, Daniel now understood, had not been a romance at all.