It told me everything about how Konstantin and his mother had understood me from the beginning: not as a woman they were deceiving, but as a mechanism they were installing.

I was a means of acquiring the shares.

Once the shares were acquired, the means was surplus.

Greta Bexley, in my jewelry, in his apartment, was presumably the beginning of my replacement already being arranged — though I felt, reading it, no jealousy toward her at all, only a cold clarity and something almost like pity, because she did not yet know that she was not Konstantin’s prize but simply the next component, and that the same line would one day be written about her.

That was the family I had almost married into: people for whom a wife was inventory, love was a cover story, and she can be replaced was not cruelty exactly, but something worse than cruelty — the simple accounting of people who had never once, in their whole lives, seen a woman as anything but an asset with a limited useful life.

Whatever was left of my heartbreak went cold and clean and still.