She had become, in his mind, a line on a balance sheet — an asset with a payout attached, a solution to a problem he had made for himself at card tables.

I do not think it happened all at once.

I think it happened the way that kind of rot always happens, by small degrees, each one easier than the last, until a man can look across the breakfast table at the mother of his child and see, instead of a wife, a policy that matures on her death.

That is the true horror of it, more than the act itself.

Not that he killed her in a moment of rage or madness — there would almost be a mercy in that.