The last I heard, through mutual acquaintances I no longer keep, Julian was living in a cramped basement apartment on the far edge of the city, working an entry-level sales job to keep up with his court-ordered restitution and the fees of the lawyer he’d had to hire to lose to mine.

And Fiona — the woman who had demanded a sixty-course heritage feast to mark her sixtieth year — was forced to sell her jewelry, one piece at a time, and to downsize from her comfortable condominium into a modest room in a retirement community she considered beneath her.

The great parade of adoring Vance relatives who had toasted her from that velvet armchair vanished, entirely and at once, the very moment the money that had drawn them dried up.

It turned out they had never been her family at all.

They had been her audience, and an audience leaves when the show is over.

Chapter 19 — The Apology Email