I stop for a moment to gauge Candace’s ability to hear more, because there is so much more to say. She swallows hard as more tears slide down her cheeks, but unlike before, these are tears of anger and profound regret.

“He told her I was dead?” she whispers.

I nod. She closes her eyes, breathes in and out with whatever strength is left to her to do such a thing, and I wait. When she opens her eyes, the sadness has been replaced with bafflement.

“But . . . but wait. Why would you do that? Why would you marry someone you don’t know?” Her tone is accusatory, and for a moment I think she is as angry with me as she must be with Martin. I tell her the answer I’ve been telling myself: I had to get out of New York. I didn’t care that I was marrying a man I didn’t love. I had made the mistake of giving my heart to someone before and had been crushed, and I was none too keen to do it again. I wanted a warm home and food to eat and a child to love. I wanted more than what I had. I wanted more than what I had been left with.

“I believed in time I would come to have affection for him, maybe even love,” I say. “But I never did. And I am quite sure he never had any affection for me.”

Candace sighs and closes her eyes tight again for a moment, as if to wish me and my horrible news away. I wait a few seconds for her to look at me again. When she does, I continue. “Martin told me he traveled about for an insurance company assessing risk, and that for appearance’s sake he needed to be seen as a successful married man with a family rather than an unlucky widower and father to a motherless child. That is why he married me, he said, and I believed him. At first.”

She swallows hard again and waits for me to go on.

“He told me his parents had died when he was six, in a carriage accident back east, and that he had been raised by an aunt and uncle who made his life difficult and that there was a cousin named Belinda who now lived south of San Francisco. He was helping her sell hair tonic that she made from herbs in her garden. He had the bottles in the boiler room of our house in San Francisco. But the bottles were not filled with hair tonic. And Belinda was not his cousin.”

Candace dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Who was she?” she says a moment later.

“She was someone who had inherited an abandoned gold mine. Martin had married her under another name to get to it. He had found out somehow that there was, in fact, gold inside it. Four months after marrying me, he married her. All while still married to you.”