We like to imagine that betrayal is a warm thing gone wrong — that people fall in love sincerely and then, corrupted by opportunity or resentment, curdle into something cruel.

It is a comforting story, because it means the love was at least real once.

But Sabine had never curdled.

There had been nothing to curdle.

She had assessed my son the way a developer assesses a piece of land — location, holdings, the strength of the title, the ease of the taking — and everything that followed, the shining dinners, the tender speeches about love mattering more than money, had been the survey and the paperwork of a hostile acquisition dressed as a romance.

Gabriel’s kindness, his trust, his tender reflex to protect, had not been things she loved in spite of their inconvenience.

They had been the specifications she’d shopped for, the very features that made him takeable.

And the most chilling thing, the thing I made myself say plainly to him later so that he would stop searching the past for a real moment to mourn, was this: there was no real moment.

There was nothing to mourn but the story he had told himself.

The woman he had loved had never existed.