They searched the open safe while Luca stood handcuffed and silent, and what they found in it laid out the full architecture of the thing he had built, and it was worse than I had let myself imagine.

There was a forged power of attorney, granting him control of Jessi’s affairs.

There was documentation of an offshore account in the Caribbean, holding three million dollars that had been quietly drained, over months, from Jessi’s family business — the business her parents had left her, the one she had run her whole life.

And there was a life insurance policy, taken out on Jessi, pre-dated, set to pay out seven million dollars upon her death.

I stood in that bedroom and understood, finally and completely, what my friend had actually been.