Chapter 1

My wife, Eleanor Chavez, said I was a spineless nobody. The day after our divorce, she married her first love in style, a man who drove a big luxury sedan.

I didn't make a scene. I sold the school-district house, got in my SUV, and drove up into the high country to clear my head.

On the ninth day out, my former mother-in-law called in a panic, sobbing, begging me to come back and take care of my ex-wife, who'd had a stroke and was paralyzed.

I was about to refuse when the police broke down the door. They told me I was the prime suspect in a sunken-body case involving Eleanor's first love, and a huge insurance payout.

Grayson Finch was forty-eight this year. He'd spent half his life as a shop-floor supervisor at an old state-run factory in the city.

Not high up, not low down. Never going hungry, never getting rich, a straight line all the way to retirement.

That day, he'd just come out of a meeting at the plant when he got a call from his wife, Eleanor Chavez.

On the other end, her voice was as impatient as ever.

"Grayson. That thing I told you about, have you thought it over yet?"

Grayson pinched the bridge of his nose, walked out to the empty lot behind the shop, and lit a cigarette.

"Eleanor, does it have to be like this? We've been together almost twenty years. Our son's already in college."

"Twenty years? Twenty years of living with a spineless nobody!" Eleanor's voice shot up. "Look at yourself. You ride some beat-up scooter to work and back, reeking of motor oil. Then look at Michael Lambert. Big luxury car, a mansion. I must have been blind to end up with you!"

Michael Lambert. Eleanor's first love.

A while back he'd suddenly come home from overseas, struck it rich, become a big boss.

Ever since, there hadn't been a moment's peace in this house.

"Eleanor, marriage isn't about measuring yourself against other people—"

"I don't have the patience for this." Eleanor cut him off. "One thing. Are you giving me this divorce or not? If you won't, I'll take you to court. I'll drag it all out in the open, and see where that leaves that old face of yours."

The line went dead with a sharp click.

Grayson finished the cigarette in silence, ground the butt into the concrete, the last spark dying out, like his heart in that moment.

He went home to a cold stove and an empty kitchen.

These past few years Eleanor had gotten hooked on line dancing at the park. She barely touched anything around the house, couldn't be bothered to cook.

Their son, Derek Finch, was away at college in Denver, home only once a week.

This twelve-hundred-square-foot place, most of the time, held no one but him.

He made himself a bowl of noodles. He was halfway through when Eleanor came back.

She was in a bright dance costume, her makeup done up thick, looking a good few years younger than usual.

She didn't so much as glance at Grayson. She walked straight to the couch, pulled a document out of her bag, and tossed it on the table.

"Sign it."

Grayson looked. Divorce papers.

The section on splitting assets was spelled out plain. The house went to Grayson. The little sedan they'd driven almost ten years went to Eleanor. And the savings, eight hundred thousand dollars, all of it, to Eleanor.

Something in Grayson's chest pricked, like a needle going in.

That eight hundred thousand was money he'd scrimped and saved for years, plus a little his parents had left behind, all painstakingly set aside. He'd meant to keep it for their son to marry on someday.

"Eleanor, this money—"

"What? You want to split it with me too?" Eleanor gave a cold laugh. "Let me tell you something, Grayson. Twenty years I stuck with you, and I don't have a single decent piece of jewelry to show for it. Call this eight hundred thousand what you owe me for the youth you wasted."

Grayson looked at her, this woman he'd shared a bed with for twenty years, and she felt like a total stranger.

He didn't argue anymore.

He picked up the pen and signed his name at the bottom of the papers.

When he was done, he felt like every last bit of strength had been drained out of him.