He wrote: Clara won’t contest anything.

She doesn’t have the strength left to ask questions.”

I sat very still in my chair, holding the phone, and the room seemed to go silent and far away around me.

My husband had written those words.

He had looked ahead, from within the weeks of our son’s dying, and seen my future grief not as a horror to dread but as an opportunity to exploit.

He had counted on the death of our child to weaken me sufficiently to rob.