It was the calmest thing I have ever said, and the coldest, and I have never once regretted it.

The fallout came fast and without mercy.

State forensic specialists searched Ottoline’s rooms in our San Diego house and found a hidden compartment in her closet — years of meticulous logs, dating back most of a decade, and research on how to make a slow poisoning read as natural disease.

I will not describe what was in those logs.

What matters is that they turned her decade of devotion, in a single afternoon, into a documented, dated confession no lawyer on earth could argue away.

Chapter 21 — The Reckoning