That was the thought that would not leave me, sitting in that underground office reading the statutes my husband had been reading.

I was going to be fine.

I had Barnabas, and a team of the best lawyers in the country, and enough money to make Ferdinand’s medical-incompetence scheme collapse the instant it touched daylight.

But the scheme itself — the mechanism, the way a determined man can use the law’s own machinery to strip a sane woman of her voice and her assets — that mechanism does not require a rich victim.

It works best, in fact, on women who don’t have a Barnabas, who can’t afford forensic auditors, who have no underground office and no grandmother’s necklace and no board waiting in a ballroom.

Ferdinand had shown me, by aiming it at me, exactly how the trap works.