At my birthday party, my husband tied me to a ceiling beam and wh*pped me thirty times because I had stained his mistress’s dress. “Maybe now you’ll learn your place,” he laughed while everyone watched. I didn’t cry. When they finally cut me down, I picked up my phone and called my five brothers. “Make his entire family beg for mercy,” I whispered. Then the front gates suddenly slammed shut.

“The consulting work was real,” Marcus said.

“The invoices were not.

You billed for projects that never existed.

The payments were a mechanism for moving money.

Your signature is on the authorization forms.”

Isaac turned to look at her.

“Clover.”

“Isaac, I can explain—”

“How long?” he asked.

She said nothing.

“How long have you known what my father was doing?”

The silence stretched.

Clover looked at the floor, then back up at Isaac.

Something shifted in her expression — not guilt exactly, but the recognition that the version of events she had prepared was no longer going to hold.

“Three years,” she said quietly.

The room absorbed that.

Isaac took one step back.

Then another.

He sat down heavily in the nearest chair, and for a moment he looked less like the man who had tied his wife to a ceiling beam and more like a person who had just discovered that the people he trusted most had been using him as cover.

I watched him.

I did not feel sorry for him.

But I noted it.

“You used me,” he said to Clover.“It wasn’t like that.”

“You used my name.

My family’s name.

You stood in this house and you—” He stopped.

His hand went to his forehead.

“How much of it was real?

Any of it?”

Clover looked at him for a long moment.

“Isaac—”

“Answer me.”

She didn’t.

That was its own kind of answer.

Noah touched my arm lightly.

“You doing all right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You don’t have to stay in this room.”

“I know.” I didn’t move.

“I want to see it.”

Wendy had been silent since Julian warned her.

She sat beside Arthur with her hands folded in her lap, her face arranged into an expression I recognized — the particular blankness of a woman who has decided that if she does not react, none of this will be real.

I had worn that expression myself.

For four years, I had worn it at every dinner, every event, every quiet evening when Isaac said something cutting and I chose not to answer.

I knew exactly what it cost.

“Wendy,” I said.