She had been using her son’s desperation as a tool to steal my inheritance for herself — and to leave him, when the dust settled, with exactly as little as she was leaving me.

I have turned that over many times, because it is the strangest and in some ways the darkest thread in the whole story, and it changed how I understood my marriage even more than Christopher’s own betrayal did.

For nine years I had believed I understood the alliance arranged against me: that Christopher and his mother were a unit, two people who shared a purpose, and that the purpose was to fold my inheritance into their family.

That much was true, but it was only the surface.

Underneath it, Beatrice had been running a second scheme, invisible to her own son, in which he was not her partner but her instrument — a desperate man she could point at me like a tool, whose panic she could use to pry my signature loose, and whom she fully intended to discard, empty-handed, the moment the tool had done its work.

She was not stealing from me for Christopher.