The binder took that story and tore it in half.

It told me that the house I had married into was not merely cold but genuinely dangerous, that the unpleasant heirs were something far worse than unpleasant, and that the shield Arthur wanted was not against sulking and lawsuits but against a slow and deliberate murder already under way.

I sat in that leather chair feeling the floor of my careful little story give way beneath me, and I understood that I had not, in fact, known what I was walking into at all.

I had thought I was marrying a lonely man.