They had thought about the paperwork.

They had thought about everything.

Everything, that is, except one thing.

It was that message, more than any other, that told me who Larissa really was — not a woman swept along by a charming man’s scheme, the way she would later paint herself for the prosecution, but a planner in her own right, cool and precise, thinking about the exact clinical window in which a signature could no longer be changed. Before they put her under. She was not worrying about whether I would live or die; that was settled, in her mind, a done thing.

She was worrying about the trust — about the timing of the paperwork, about making sure the money was legally captured before the drugs took my consciousness and, with it, my ability to alter anything.