The phone in the bouquet was not the act of a woman who trusted her groom.

I want to be clear about that, because there is a version of this story where I was simply a naive bride ambushed at the altar, and it is not the true one.

I had walked into that cathedral already knowing what Konstantin was.

The due diligence had come back weeks earlier — the phantom contracts, the borrowing against my name, the woman wearing my jewelry.

I could have called it off then, quietly, and I had thought hard about doing exactly that.

But my father and Cleo and I had talked it through, and we had understood something about a man like Konstantin: that if I simply left, he would spin it, would tell the world I was unstable, would go on using my name to raise money and might well try again with someone else.