A dream home.

On my money.

For his mistress.

While his mother lectured me on my failure to give him an heir.

I did not weep for long.

I have never been a woman who can weep and think at the same time, and thinking was what the situation required.

So I let myself have those few silent tears, there in the dark, and then I set them aside, the way you close a spreadsheet you are finished with, and I began, in my head, in the small hours of that morning, to build the machine that would take everything back.

Chapter 12 — Paper Trails