Chapter 1 — Five Days

“You’re finally going to die, Roderick. I’m so sick of pretending to love you.”

Roderick Benedict heard the words before he could open his eyes. They arrived from somewhere above him, low and clear, in the voice he had once believed he knew better than his own.

It took a long moment to pull his eyelids apart, and when he did, the ceiling of the room swam into focus first — acoustic tiles, a fluorescent panel someone had dimmed to a soft gray — and then her face, leaning over the bed rail, close enough that he could smell the perfume she wore for evenings out.

Rain lashed the high windows of St. Jude Memorial Hospital. Twelve floors down, downtown Baltimore had gone the color of wet slate, the harbor lost somewhere in the murk.

Inside the room, the only steady sound was the heart monitor beside him, tapping out a rhythm that even Roderick, who knew nothing about medicine, could tell was wrong — faint, and hesitant, and uneven, like a clock running down.

He had heard the truth that morning without meaning to. The cardiologist had stepped into the hall to speak with a nurse, and had lowered his voice the way people do when they believe the patient is asleep.

Roderick had not been asleep. He had been lying very still with his eyes shut, drifting on the edge of the sedation, and the words had come through the half-open door with terrible clarity.

“He has five days. Maybe less. The damage to the heart tissue is simply too extensive — it’s not something we can reverse at this stage.” A pause. “Has the family been told?”

“The wife knows,” the nurse had answered.

Roderick had lain there afterward and tried to feel the size of it. Five days. He was fifty-six years old. He had built, from a single leased workshop and a line of credit he’d signed for at twenty-nine, a commercial furniture manufacturing plant in Detroit that now employed four hundred people.

He owned an estate in Bethesda with a view of old oaks, two condominiums in the city he rarely used, a portfolio he checked less and less as the numbers grew, and liquid accounts that, the last time his accountant had walked him through them, totaled more than eighty-two million dollars.

And he had a wife sixteen years his junior. Demi. Elegant, attentive, quick to laugh, quicker to touch his arm across a dinner table so that other men would notice and envy him.