“You are very naive,” she said, “if you don’t think life gives one plenty of chances to do that.”

Sophie looked down. Naive. Stupid. Passive. Yes, well, she knew what Katherine thought, what they all thought. She, middle-class, uneducated Sophie Roberts, picked, against all likelihood, by the great Pierre Massot, at nineteen, to be his wife. And the mother to his one child—thankfully, a son. What had she done, all these years, except learn how to dress, and behave, and host parties?

She rose. “I had to inform you myself.”

“Yes. Thank you for that.” Katherine’s bony claw picked up the papers, neatly folded, and extended them towards Sophie. She reached to take them, but for a moment the old woman held on to them.

“Amazing,” she said. “You need only sign. And you will control eighty million euros.”

Sophie hesitated, then gently took the documents from her mother-in-law’s hand.

“Pierre would never have wanted us to quarrel.”

“And all you have to do to get them,” Katherine said, as though she hadn’t spoken, “is declare that he is dead.”

“Because he is dead,” Sophie said, helplessly. “It’s been so many years.”

Katherine Massot sighed and turned her face away, as though she were just too weary to deal with Sophie anymore.

Sophie waited a moment, then noiselessly rose and left the house. Outside, on the raked gravel of the driveway, her car and driver were waiting. As he stepped out and opened the back door for her, and Sophie slid gracefully inside—knees together, ankles lifted in one catlike movement—she breathed out. Not so much in relief. There was too much to do for her to be relieved. But at least in respite.

The car pulled noiselessly away, following the winding road back to the main house. It was late May and a glorious spring evening, the warm, fading light bright with the promise of summer. The topiary hedges cast long shadows over the smooth lawns, and the lake sparkled brilliantly in the setting sun.

It was an evening very like that one just more than seven years ago, when her husband kissed her on the cheek and told her he had to see to some business in the city. Nothing important, he told her.

He walked out of the front porch, and she never saw him again.

Chapter 2

Chapter 2

“And the Oscar goes to . . .”

The superstar comic paused for a second to give the moment its required suspense. In the glittering ballroom, Hugh heard the intake of breath all around him. Everybody waiting, eyes fixed on the giant screen.

He was not nervous. He felt perfectly calm. His heart was pulsing at a steady sixty beats per minute, an athlete’s pace.

“Jill Calvert!”