“It’s done,” she said. “He’s gone. It’s finally, actually done.”

She got up, wrapped herself in the silk robe that had cost more than Brandon Robbins made in a month, and went down to the kitchen, and took a bottle of Roderick’s good champagne from the wine refrigerator — she made a point of choosing the most expensive one — and poured two tall glasses, and carried them back up the stairs.

They drank in bed while the sun came up over the oaks, and Demi talked about San Diego, about the glass house on the water, about the boat she thought they might buy, about how quickly they could sell the ugly serious furniture Roderick had loved.

She arranged the memorial for the following week, and she arranged it cheaply, because every dollar spent on the dead was a dollar taken from the living, and the living, as far as Demi was concerned, was her.

A modest chapel, a short service, no reception to speak of. She wore black lace and a veil, and she performed. She had always been able to perform. She dabbed at dry eyes in front of Roderick’s plant managers and his golf acquaintances and the handful of relatives who came, and she let her voice break at exactly the right moment in exactly the right places, and afterward more than one person told her, pressing her hand, that she had loved him so.

It was near the end, as the small crowd thinned toward the doors, that she saw the young man standing at the back of the chapel. Plain suit, ill-fitting, the kind you buy off a rack for occasions like this.