“What did he tell her he needed it for?” I asked the detective.

“He said you were in the hospital in critical condition,” the detective said, watching my face, “and that you’d begged him to sell the building to pay for emergency surgery.”

I laughed, and there was nothing in the laugh at all.

He had seen me alive.

He had watched the whole thing collapse.

And he had gotten in his car and driven to a notary’s office to keep robbing me anyway, as if my being alive were merely an inconvenient delay in the paperwork.

That detail told me more about my husband than the seven years of marriage had.