She had gamed out the sequence.

She had thought about the order of operations of my death the way I once thought about the order of operations in a merger.

And reading it, I felt the last of some old reflexive impulse toward pity for her — the other woman, perhaps herself deceived, perhaps in over her head — go cold and quiet and die.

She was not in over her head.

She was doing arithmetic over my anesthetized body, and the only variable she had failed to check was the one I had already changed, three weeks before, while she was still touching my belly at galas and waiting for the math to come out in her favor.