And so we chose the funeral.

It was, I will admit, theatrical, and I have been asked since whether I regret making my return a spectacle rather than a quiet call to a detective.

I do not.

Because Brandon had built his whole crime on the confidence that no one would ever contradict his story, and I wanted that confidence to be at its absolute height — his hand almost literally on the fifty million dollars, the entire community assembled to believe him — at the exact instant the truth walked through the door.

I did not only want to survive Brandon.

I wanted every single person he had lied to to watch the lie collapse in real time, so that there could never again be any doubt, in this life, about what my husband was.