He would reflect, afterward, on how much had turned on those two small facts — a woman’s habit of declining wine, and the physical impossibility of dragging someone to safety across the very glass that had cut them.

Vanessa’s explanation had been fluent, immediate, plausible; delivered to almost anyone else, it would very likely have worked.

A drunk servant, an accident, a fall — it was the kind of story that slides easily into a wealthy household’s assumptions about the people who serve it, and Vanessa had counted on exactly that, had constructed her lie to fit the prejudices she expected Daniel to hold.

What she had not counted on was that Daniel, for all his blindness about Maria as a person, happened to possess two specific pieces of contradicting knowledge, and that in a moment of crisis his mind reached for them.