The wedding was enormous, far more than I would ever have chosen, but Arthur understood something about appearances that I did not yet grasp: that a marriage meant to hold up in a courtroom had to be seen, publicly and beyond dispute, to be real.

There were reporters at the mansion gates, their cameras raised, hungry for the story of the aging tycoon and the nurse.

There were white roses everywhere, banks and cascades of them, filling the great rooms with a heavy sweetness.

And there were Arthur’s children, Julian and Victoria, standing among the guests and staring at me across the flowers as though I had crept into their home in the night and stolen something that belonged to them.

I did not yet know how much they believed I had stolen, or what they had already done, and were still doing, to protect it.