They never spoke where anyone could hear, but they passed messages in the small currency of glances — a look held a half-second too long, a nod at nothing.

Cordray confirmed it later: her shifts over the past three weeks had lined up, to the hour, with every one of my husband’s visits.

Chapter 13 — Sixty for Me, Forty for You

That night an encrypted email came through from Constance, my father’s secretary of twenty years — a woman who had, it turned out, been quietly gathering evidence on his instructions for weeks.

Attached was an audio file: a recorded meeting between Devon and my uncle Horace.

The will’s finalized, Devon’s voice said, tinny through my phone. We just need the medical situation to run its course.