Sennett sat to the right of the long table, tie loosened, posture arranged into the very picture of a weary, grieving caretaker.

Beside him sat Perpetua — a woman I had learned, weeks earlier and painfully, was his mistress — wearing a sapphire necklace I recognized from an auction catalog that had gone missing from my own desk.

And at the head of the table, in my chair, sat a woman I had never met, in a blood-red coat, with my father’s hazel eyes looking out of a stranger’s face.

“Adair,” she said, with a thin, rehearsed smile.

“Sit down.” “I’ll stand in my own building,” I said, and I watched Sennett’s head come up, watched him search my face for the glazed confusion he’d been dosing into me for six months, and find none of it.

Find, instead, something that made the color start to leave his face before I’d said a single accusing word.