I drove to the estate’s east wing first, because I still had a key card and a suitcase in the bridal suite and, honestly, because some stupid part of me thought Daniel would come up the stairs after me and say he was sorry.

The card didn’t work.

I tried it four times, and the little light kept blinking red, and finally a house staffer I’d never met opened the door two inches and told me the locks had been changed that evening on Mr. Whitmore’s orders.

She had my dress bag in her hand.

She handed it to me through the gap and closed the door.

So I slept at the Ashford Inn on the highway, in a room with a humming air conditioner, still in my wedding underwear, and I called Daniel eleven times.

Eleven.

It rang through every time.

The next morning at nine, a man named Douglas Pratt called my cell and asked if I could come to his office in town.

He was the Whitmore family lawyer.

He had been at the wedding.

He sat behind his desk with his hands folded and he did not offer me coffee.

“Mrs. Whitmore, I want to be direct with you.”

“It’s Nora.”

“Nora.

There is a clause in your prenuptial agreement that you and Daniel signed in March.”

I knew about the prenup.

Everyone knew about the prenup, my own attorney had gone through it page by page and told me it was standard, that it protected Daniel’s family holdings, that it was nothing personal.

Douglas slid a copy across the desk and turned it around so it faced me and put his finger on a paragraph near the bottom.

It was the part about conduct.

It said that if the marriage ended within the first two years because of moral turpitude, or because of an act of violence against a member of the Whitmore family, then I forfeited the settlement.

All of it.

And it said the family reserved the right to pursue a criminal complaint.

“She fell,” I said.

“Margaret is eighty-one years old and she says you pushed her.”

“Margaret was confused before the ceremony.

She called me by her sister’s name at the rehearsal dinner.”

“That’s a serious thing to say about a woman who just spent the night in the hospital.”

I sat there with my hands in my lap and I understood, all at once, what Daniel meant at the pool.

He wasn’t just throwing me out of a party.

He was closing a door on my whole life, and the clause was the hinge.

“Where is he?”

I asked.

“He’s with his mother.”

“He won’t take my calls.”

“No,” Douglas said, and he said it kindly, which was worse.

“He won’t.”

I walked out of that office into the parking lot and stood by my car for a long time with my phone against my forehead.

Then it rang.

It was the estate’s landline, and I knew the number by heart because I had called it every day for a year to check on Margaret.

“Nora?”

It was Rosa, the housekeeper, whispering so low I had to press the phone into my ear.

“Are you all right?”

I asked her.

“Don’t worry about me.

Listen.

Mrs. Whitmore has been asking for you since they brought her home this morning.

She keeps saying your name and then she says the floor was wet.”

“Rosa, did you hear anything?

Did you see anything from the kitchen?”

There was a long pause, and I heard a door close somewhere in that house.

“She told me something an hour ago,” Rosa said.

“She was crying and she told me Celia walked her toward the pool, holding her arm.

Then she stopped talking the second Celia came into the room.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t.

“Nora,” Rosa whispered.

“I have to go.”

The line clicked off.

I stood in that parking lot with the sun on my shoulders and the wedding ring still on my finger, and I thought about Celia crouched on the patio, scooping her mother’s pills off the stone, refusing to look at me.

I have never in my life wanted to be wrong about someone so badly.

I got in the car and I drove back toward that gate.