A year after that thirty-fourth birthday, I went back to the estate one final time.

Not to live there.

I could never have lived there.

I had decided, months earlier, what to do with it instead, and I had come to watch the beginning of it.

I had donated the property.

The whole estate — the grand ballroom, the marble, the grounds, all of it — was being converted into a comprehensive rehabilitation and legal-support center for survivors of domestic abuse, funded in significant part by the assets recovered from the Calloway fraud proceedings.

The money Preston had stolen to buy his mistress an apartment would now pay for shelter and lawyers and counseling for women trying to escape men just like him.