She was not screaming about the mortgage. That is the part I had not expected. She was screaming because Harrison, in shutting off the payments, had pulled the last five years of statements into a single folder, and the numbers told a story none of them had wanted assembled in one place. I had been paying four thousand one hundred a month on that house. The mortgage itself was two thousand two hundred. Camille had been collecting the difference. She had convinced Rosalind years ago to let her “manage the household accounts,” and every month she skimmed nineteen hundred dollars of my money off a bill I never checked because I trusted the woman I married to tell me the truth about his own family.

That was why Camille was the favorite. That was why the seafood platter, the class, the good breeding. She was spending my money on herself and being praised at my expense for her generosity to the family.

Sebastian did not know. I believe that, and it is somehow worse. He had simply never looked, because looking was my job, and not looking let him keep whispering don’t make a scene.