My daughter carried a three-million-dollar life insurance policy, and Damon carried debts he had hidden from everyone — gambling losses, deep ones, the kind that swallow a man — and somewhere in the arithmetic of his own ruin he had decided that Tessa was worth more to him dead than alive.

He had arranged the immediate cremation for one reason: to burn the evidence before anyone with a badge or a scalpel could ever go looking for it.

That phrase — worth more dead than alive — is the one I cannot get out of my head, because of what it reveals about how he had been seeing her, probably for a long time before the end.

To do what he did, Damon had to have stopped, at some point, experiencing my daughter as a person at all.