The next day, alone at my bedside, she called me an old man.

I was forty-six.

And I lay there and listened to the woman I had loved, the woman I had been going to marry, reveal herself, sentence by sentence, as something I had never suspected: not a grieving fiancee at all, but a person standing at the edge of a fortune, impatient for the last obstacle between her and it, which was me, to finish dying.

I had thought, in my arrogance, that I understood people.