The single most important variable in his whole equation — the money, the reason for all of it — had gone out of reach weeks before, by a wife he had never bothered to consider capable of moving anything.

He was so certain I was a passive holder of wealth, a vessel he could empty by killing, that it never crossed his mind I might be actively managing it, watching it, protecting it, the way I had protected it for years.

He read every statement, he assumed, no more than I read them; he never grasped that I read them more closely than he did.

And so his perfect plan had a hole in the exact center of it, a hole shaped like my competence, and he walked his whole scheme straight through it without ever seeing it was there.