I had injected thirty-two million dollars into Calloway Development.

I had personally guaranteed their emergency credit line.

I had, in every legal particular, become the thing that was holding Preston’s entire world up.

And Preston had never once bothered to read the underlying corporate filings, because he had assumed — arrogantly, fatally — that my signature was on the paperwork simply because dutiful wives sign whatever their husbands put in front of them.

He had never imagined that the documents he waved me toward were documents I had drafted.