My assistant, a sharp and loyal young woman named Antea, knocked and came in with the mail.

The year had not been a straight line, and I would not want to pretend it was.

There were nights, early on, when the cold competence deserted me and I was just a woman alone in a new house, grieving not Ian — I never once missed Ian — but the years I had given to a lie, the version of myself I had let them shrink, the trust in people that I was not sure I would ever get back.

Betrayal at that scale does not only take your money and your marriage; it takes your confidence in your own judgment, because you have to live afterward with the knowledge that you looked at these people every day for five years and did not see them.

I had to rebuild that judgment from the ground up, and it was slow, and there were setbacks.

But I rebuilt it.