Because the man who was supposed to be her protector, her partner, the person the whole world would expect to keep her safe, was the person who had done this.

In the ordinary architecture of a life, a married woman in mortal danger has a husband to turn to; that is what a husband is for; and Jessi’s husband was the danger.

Everyone she would ordinarily have leaned on for protection led back, through forty years of shared friendship, to Luca.

Her family knew him.

Her friends were their friends.

The world she lived in had been, without her knowing it, quietly converted into his territory, every relationship in it running through the man trying to kill her.