My daughter, Ivana, told me, “Dad, you barely know her.” My son, Elliott, did not even come to the wedding.

I was angry with them both.

I told myself they simply refused to let me be happy — that they saw a threat to an inheritance rather than a companion for their lonely father.

It is an ugly thing to admit, but I thought less of my own children in those months than I ever had in my life, and I thought it because a beautiful woman had made it convenient for me to think it.

That, I would learn, was among the first things Dulce did: she moved my children to the far side of a wall, gently, so that when the time came there would be no one close enough to see.

It is a standard move, I understand now, the isolation — the first step in every scheme of this kind.