It outlasted a fortune, a scheme, and a fire.

That was his real mistake, I have decided — not a flaw in the plan, but a blindness in the man.

Damon planned for everything he could see and weigh and buy.

He planned for the coroner, and the timing, and the paperwork, and the appearances; he planned for a grieving family too polite and too shattered to make trouble.

What he could not plan for was the one thing he had never possessed and therefore did not believe was real: love that does not calculate.

Every move he made assumed that everyone around him was running the same cold arithmetic he was, weighing cost against benefit, and that faced with the social cost of an accusation and the impossibility of proof, we would all do the sensible, self-protecting thing and let it go.