It was that a con artist had taken my truest longing and turned it into the instrument of my near-murder, and that for a while I had been grateful to her for it.

Bess had loved me for fifty years and asked for nothing.

Dulce had performed love for three and tried to kill me for a house.

Standing in my study, I understood at last, and completely, the difference between the two — and I understood that I had known it all along, in the eight lonely years before Dulce, every time I reached across the empty bed and remembered what the real thing had felt like.

Chapter 36 — Six Months Later

Six months on, the morning sun came warm and bright across the back patio.