He had the money and the lawyers and the standing to make a great deal of this quietly disappear, and a lesser version of him would have.

He did not.

And she came to understand, watching him strip his own wife of the foundation and the accounts in front of witnesses, that Beaufort’s coldness — the hardness she had never been able to warm to in two years — was not the same thing as his wife’s.

Sabetha’s coldness served only Sabetha.

Beaufort’s, it turned out, served a code, an old and rigid and unsentimental sense of what was and was not permissible, and that code, whatever else could be said about the man, did not bend when it discovered that the person who had violated it was the woman he had slept beside for forty years.

He did not enjoy what he did to Sabetha that day.