He had not fallen out of love with her.

He had never been able to forgive her for being more than him, and the money she’d uncovered in the firm’s accounts had simply given his resentment, at last, a practical shape.

He needed her gone not only because she’d found the theft, but because her being gone would finally make him the largest person in his own life.

The crime and the wound were the same wound.

She had married a man who could not survive being second, and she had spent fifteen years being, without trying, first.

Chapter 5 — It Had Been Him