And then came the fifth afternoon, and the whisper. Die before Friday, Julian.

The money moves faster when you stop breathing.

I stayed still, as I had stayed still for five days, and I let her leave.

But that whisper was different from everything that had come before it, and I knew it even as I lay there absorbing it.

The betrayals I had catalogued all week had been about positioning, about getting ready to inherit a dead man’s power.

This was not that.