The drive home from that gallery was, I am told, conducted in a suffocating silence, Beatrice staring out the window with her handbag clutched in both hands, the brutal truth arriving in her at last: that the lavish life she had boasted about for years had been bankrolled, every dollar of it, by the woman she had smugly forced out of the family.

And the collapse came fast, the way collapses do once the thing propping everything up is removed.

Christopher had barely walked through his door when the calls began — the auto-finance company, on his mother’s leased luxury car, payment bounced, repossession in forty-eight hours.

Then a jewelry lender, an installment on an expensive ring severely past due.

Then a debt collector, his office lease in default now that the automatic payments had stopped.

He sank onto the sofa and put his face in his hands as his entire world came apart around him, every pillar of it revealing itself, all at once, to have been made of my money.