He had not simply wanted out of his marriage.

A man who wants out of a marriage gets a divorce.

Luca had wanted something a divorce could not give him: everything, and none of the cost.

A divorce would have split the assets, exposed the drained business, ended the affair’s funding, cut his fortune in half.

So he had engineered, instead, a solution with no downside — a death that looked like a medical tragedy, a grieving-widower narrative he had already begun rehearsing, and, on the far side of the funeral, ten million dollars and complete freedom, with the woman who might have contested any of it safely and permanently silent.

It was not a crime of passion.