I only nodded and let her keep talking, because whatever her reasons, her testimony would put the truth on a record where it could not be unsaid.

She told me the rest in the same flat, detached voice, and the detachment was worse than any amount of weeping would have been.

Years ago, she said, she and Dario had faced ruin after a string of failed clinic investments.

Dario could not bear to lose the image of the successful man.

His first wife had come from real family money, and when she died, her estate saved him.

And once they understood how easily it had been done — how completely a grieving husband is trusted, how rarely anyone looks hard at a sudden death — they built it into something deliberate.