Candace seems to dissolve for a moment into her pillows, and her face becomes a mask of the worst kind of sadness. She brings a hand up to her forehead, and many moments pass before she removes the hand to look back at me.

“How do you know all this?” she asks, misery etched into her face. “How do you know this is all true?”

“Because Belinda came to my house looking for her husband. The man she knew as James had my San Francisco address on some letters she saw. He had told her he was a land surveyor and that he traveled for his job; that is how he explained his absences from her. He’d been gone longer than expected and she’d been worried. Belinda came to my house the day before the earthquake. She was pregnant, far along. And she saw my wedding photograph on the mantel in the living room. She saw that Martin was the husband she knew as James. We pieced it together, and we found all the documents that prove it in Martin’s desk. I have those documents right here in my bag. And that’s not all. There was someone else before you. He married a girl in Colorado under another, different name. She was set to inherit a cattle ranch. Her mother died suddenly after she and Martin married, and that young wife died a year later in a riding accident.”

My voice is catching in my throat as I think about Annabeth, and that perhaps a similar fate had been awaiting me and Belinda. “Only I don’t think it was an accident,” I continue, tears stinging my own eyes. “I think Martin killed her for the ranch. He sold it when she died and then came to Los Angeles with the money and got hired as a stable hand, where he met you. An heiress.”

What little color remains in Candace’s face suddenly drains.

“Sweet Jesus,” she whispers, as though something monumental and devastating has just been made clear to her.

“What?” I say. “What is it?”

“Father was right,” she whispers, but not to me. She is inside a moment of her own between herself and a parent who I know has recently died.

“About what?” I can’t help asking.

She slowly turns her head back to face me. “My father said all along Martin married me to get my grandmother’s inheritance. I didn’t believe him. I believed Martin loved me, and it hurt to my very soul that my father thought he didn’t. God, what a fool I was. An utter fool!”

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” I quickly interject, thinking back to what Belinda told me about how she’d been wooed. “I think Martin knew how to charm women into falling in love with him. I think he had made it his life’s work.”

“But how could I have not seen it? I knew enough about men and what they wanted. I knew what my father’s rich friends’ sons were like underneath their airs and bravado. I knew!”