I had, it turned out, married a man fighting for his life, and in marrying him I had stepped, without knowing it, into the middle of that fight, on the side of the one person in that house who had done nothing to deserve what was being done to him.

Chapter 10 — My Children Are Dangerous

“My children are not greedy, Clara,” Arthur said, sinking heavily into his chair.

“I could forgive greed.

What they are is dangerous.”

He told me then, in the flat careful voice of a man reciting a thing he can hardly bear to say aloud, what his private security team had uncovered some months before.

His son Julian, it seemed, had been quietly paying Arthur’s own personal physician to interfere with the medicines that were keeping Arthur’s failing heart beating, so that death might come sooner, before Arthur could finish rewriting his estate.