And it had gone on without me and become the richest life I had ever encountered, and I had watched it accept its gold medals from across an auditorium, from the wrong side of a decision I made in one afternoon when I was twenty-nine and certain I was being smart.

Outside the study doors the chaos began — Delphine screaming at the staff, something fragile shattering on the marble, Auberon’s muffled, resentful sobs.

The soundtrack of my engineered life.

It made me physically ill.

I stood at the tall windows over the floodlit lawns and took out my phone and found I had nowhere to send it: I had not known her number in over a decade.

She had cut me out of her universe with surgical precision.