While I grieved a husband who had traded me for his assistant, that husband and his brother and, I would soon learn, his mother had been quietly emptying the estate my grandmother spent her life building.

I had thought I was the victim of a broken heart.

I was the victim of a family business.

And once I understood that, a great many small things I had never been able to explain clicked into place at once, the way the last few pieces of a puzzle suddenly reveal the picture.

The strange urgency Damon had shown about keeping the divorce quick and quiet — I had read it as a man eager to be rid of me, and it was that, but it was also a man racing a clock, needing the settlement finalized before anyone thought to look too hard at the accounts.

The way he had discouraged me, gently, from involving my grandmother’s old estate lawyer, suggesting we keep things “simple” and “friendly” — I had taken it as consideration, and it had been concealment.