Before that there had been two other places, each cheaper than the last, as she worked out exactly how little her family could live on.

She was an accountant. She worked eight to five, and then most nights after the children were asleep she took on freelance bookkeeping to cover the rent, the school fees, the groceries, the small emergencies that never stopped coming.

She slept four or five hours and she did not complain, because somewhere in the last eight months she had learned that fear accomplished nothing, while a well-organized folder of financial documents sometimes accomplished a great deal.

She had not always been this person. Eight months earlier she had been a woman who trusted her own home, who signed what her husband put in front of her because he was her husband and a lawyer and she loved him and it never occurred to her to read it twice.

That woman felt like a stranger now. The divorce had aged her in a way that had nothing to do with her face — it had taught her to be suspicious, to keep copies, to photograph documents, to never again let anyone else be the only person in a marriage who understood where the money was.

It was a brutal education and she had paid full tuition for it.

The one thing she was determined to salvage from the wreck was that her children would not have to learn it the same way.

They would grow up knowing exactly where they stood, on ground nobody could sell out from under them in the dark.

She set a cup of coffee in front of Ruth and sat down across from her, and slowly, plainly, she told her mother-in-law the truth.

Chapter 3 — A Cold Operation

Jason had not simply left her for Vanessa, his twenty-eight-year-old assistant. That was the part everyone would understand — a man, a younger woman, the oldest and dullest story there is.

If it had only been that, Claire thought, she could almost have forgiven the ordinariness of it.

But Jason was a corporate lawyer, and he had not left like a man in love.