Two people who had each, separately, decided never to be reached — reaching each other.

Chapter 8 — The Ledgers at Thornevale

In the weeks that followed, the marriage that had been built as a transaction began, quietly, to become something else.

It started with numbers, which was fitting for both of them.

Cosima, now that no one was preventing her, asked to see the accounts for the Thornevale estate — and found, threaded through them, a pattern of fraudulent charges that had been quietly bleeding the estate’s own workers for years: skimmed wages, phantom vendors, a payroll that never quite added up in the direction of the people who actually did the work.

She brought it to Caspian expecting an argument, or worse, indifference.