What Richard had done was something colder and more deliberate than that.

He had sat down, presumably, and done arithmetic.

He had looked at his brother’s widow and his brother’s child and his brother’s money, and he had calculated a path by which the money and the child could become his, and the path ran through a murder and a frame and the judicial killing of an innocent woman, and he had judged the price acceptable and set about paying it.

Every kindness he had performed in the years since, every tear at the sentencing, every tender act of raising Chloe, had been part of the calculation, maintenance on an investment, the necessary performance of a grief he did not feel to protect a crime he had committed in cold blood.