This was patience. Ottoline had looked at me, years ago, and seen not a person but an obstacle between her family’s money and her family’s blood, and she had sat down and made a plan with a timeline measured in years.

She had calculated that a sudden death would draw suspicion and a slow one would not, and she had chosen the slow one, chosen to make me suffer for years precisely because my suffering was the cover story — the longer and more convincingly I sickened, the cleaner the eventual death would look on the chart.

She had chosen, deliberately, to watch me decline.

To attend the frightening appointments.

To hold me while I cried.

Every gentleness of those ten years had been a line item in a plan to inherit, each act of love a brick in the false narrative of a woman dying naturally of a mystery illness.