The marriage was annulled on the grounds of fraud, and law enforcement proceeded with criminal charges, for child endangerment and financial conspiracy, against both Sarah and Julian.

Marcus took no pleasure in any of it, and he wants that understood too.

Watching the woman he had married led toward criminal charges was not a triumph; it was the grim conclusion of the worst thing that had ever happened to his family, and there was no version of it that felt like winning.

He had loved Sarah, or had loved the person she had performed for him, which amounted for a while to the same thing, and there is a specific grief in learning that the love you gave was received by someone who never existed, a person assembled from a pitch deck and a strategy to harvest your child’s inheritance.

He grieved that.