He had drunk water and waited for it to work and it never worked, and he had not understood why, and he had lain there thinking, perhaps, that the disease had simply moved past the reach of medicine.

That is the part I have never been able to make peace with, even having chosen not to hate.

Not the stolen money.

Not the cruise.

The three days he spent believing his own body had given up on him, when the truth was that his wife had — while smiling for photographs on a ship.

There are crimes the law has names for, and this was several of them at once.

But the law had no name for the exact thing I felt looking at that bottle, which was the plain discovery that a person I had called family could watch another person suffer, on purpose, to save the cost of a refill.