That story flattered him twice over: it cast me as weak, and it cast him as the prize I was scrambling to secure.

He wanted so badly for it to be true that he never once examined it.

A more careful man, a less vain one, would have paused at a wife who agreed to a humiliating year-long charade and then asked, calmly, for her assets to be separated first.

He would have felt the wrongness of it.

But Spencer could not feel it, because feeling it would have required him to entertain the possibility that I was the strategist and he the mark, and that possibility was unthinkable to a man whose entire self was built on being the cleverest person present.

So he signed.