Your wife told everyone she was a security consultant.

She forgot to mention she used to run with criminals.” That lie had been planted with care.

For three months, anonymous gossip accounts had posted photographs of me entering police buildings, meeting detectives, walking through neighborhoods her friends called dangerous.

She had taken the evidence of my work and rewritten it into a story of disgrace.

It had been, I will admit, a clever campaign.

Seraphina understood something real about the world she moved in — that among wealthy people, the appearance of a thing matters more than the thing itself, and that a photograph of a woman shaking hands with a detective outside a precinct can be made to mean whatever the caption underneath it says.