“She ruined it.

If she had only finished her tea, every morning, like a dutiful wife, she would have faded away in a hospital bed — no pain, no scandal, organ failure on the chart, and we would have raised Esme together, Darius.

We would have had the estate.”

I listened to her say it and understood that she genuinely believed she was the wronged party.

That was the thing about Ottoline that the trial would later make official but that I saw first, in that chapel: she had no sense at all that she had done wrong.

In her telling — and she believed her telling completely — I was the aggressor.