“Touch me again,” I said, quietly, “and you’ll regret it.”

And Wendy laughed.

That is the detail I have never forgotten — that she laughed, waving a hand through the air as though I were a child performing a tantrum for the adults’ amusement.

“Oh,” she said, to Luca, delighted.

“There’s the little accountant, pretending she has teeth.”

That was her fatal mistake, and I felt it land as she said it — felt her hand her own downfall across the table without knowing she’d done it.

Because Wendy still saw, when she looked at me, the grieving daughter who had kept her head down in finance and never made trouble.