Before I was a lonely widower I had spent forty years as one of the most feared corporate attorneys in the state, a man who had sat across boardroom tables from people far more ruthless than Dulce and taken them apart with nothing but patience and paperwork.

I knew how frauds were built and, more to the point, I knew how they were broken.

I knew that the instinct to act immediately — to call the police that very night, to confront her, to shout — was exactly the instinct that let the guilty escape, because it gave them warning, and a warned schemer with good lawyers is nearly untouchable.

The cold that at that desk was the return of a self I had let grief and loneliness bury.

Dulce had made one error, and it was the error such people always make: she had looked at the surface of a man and mistaken it for the whole of him.

She saw a sad, besotted septuagenarian.