A man alone on a floor, holding proof that the son he had traded everything to secure was another man’s child, planted in his life by an enemy who had read him like a cheap paperback.

Everything Roderick believed about himself collapsed in that hallway at once.

That he was the smartest man in every room.

That he was the hunter and never the hunted.

That his name and his money and his blood made him the author of his own story rather than a character in someone else’s.

Kingsley’s line about the ego being the easiest back door he had ever walked through was not a boast; it was a diagnosis, and it was correct.

My husband had been undone not by a rival’s genius but by his own vanity, which had made him predictable, and legible, and finally, fatally, easy.