And beside it I left a single note, short, because there was nothing left that needed to be long.

I stayed beside your mother until her very last breath.

Starting today, any communication regarding me, your family, or our assets will go strictly through my attorney.

Then I packed two suitcases — only two; it is remarkable, after twenty years, how little of a life like that you actually want to take with you — and I walked out the front door, and I locked it behind me, and I did not look back at it.

Julian, wherever he was that night, still believed he had an obedient, long-suffering, endlessly patient wife waiting for him at home, just where he had left her.

He still believed that his mother’s millions were about to become his.