My passport, my emergency cards, a box of my grandmother’s jewelry, and — the thing that mattered — the binder holding my copies of the prenuptial agreement and certain corporate records were gone.

The phantom heart attack had been a lure to get me out of the way while they emptied my apartment.

It was clumsy, and it was documented, and it would cost them.

What they wanted, of course, was the prenuptial agreement — the piece of paper that stood between Zane and everything he’d assumed was half his.

I think he believed, in some magical way, that if the document simply vanished, so would the fact of it, as though my lawyers didn’t hold three certified copies and the county a fourth.

That was the whole shape of the man in one clumsy burglary: a person who mistook the record of a thing for the thing itself, who thought a marriage could be won by hiding paper and a fraud undone by deleting a file.