He was going to kill the mother of his child for money that would never, under any circumstances, be his.

He simply didn’t know it yet.

There is a bleak justice in that timing that I still turn over sometimes, late at night, when the house is quiet.

Beckett took pride in being a planner.

He had thought of the anesthesia, and the funeral, and the down payment, and the cameras he believed weren’t in that corridor.

He had built an elaborate, patient, months-long machine for turning my death into his fortune.

And the entire time, the fortune had already left the room.