And then, on the other side of the ledger, the company reported those same amounts as losses against its income, and moved the cash through a shell subcontractor that existed only on paper and was controlled, it turned out, by Evelyn.

It was, my forensic accountant explained to me, a genuinely elegant piece of fraud, in the way that certain crimes are elegant right up until someone competent looks at them closely.

My own money, taken without my knowledge, laundered through his mother’s fake company, and written off against his taxes, so that Julian got to spend my inheritance twice — once as cash, and once as a deduction — while telling the world I had never contributed anything.

They had built all of it, I understood, on a single assumption: that when the moment came, I would be too humiliated to fight back.

That a woman publicly branded as barren and cast off would want nothing more than to disappear, to sign whatever was put in front of her and slink away, too ashamed to make anyone look closely.

It was not an unreasonable assumption.