Julian’s lawful wife.”

Fourteen million dollars.

I sat in that hospital chair, a grieving hospital volunteer in a yellow sweater with a soda-can pull tab on my finger, and heard that I had, without the faintest idea I was doing it, inherited fourteen million dollars from a man I had married out of pity, and I could not speak.

“But understand,” Arthur said gently, “that Julian did not marry you merely to keep the estate from his son.

He could have found any number of ways to do that, a will, a trust, a legal transfer.