Working as a driver for a powerful businessman was never the life I dreamed of. I had always wanted to build something of my own — a construction company with my name on it. But dreams don’t always pay the bills, and life has a funny way of leading you somewhere unexpected. The one good thing about my job was that I got to work with my wife, Alice. We had met years before and now found ourselves working for the same company. She was Mr. Taylor’s personal assistant —

Sometimes in a marriage, the world doesn’t break beneath you. It just shifts—quietly, almost secretly—like the floor is tilting just enough to make you wonder if you imagined it. For Celia, that shift started on an ordinary Tuesday. Milan had soccer practice, Madison demanded her sandwich be cut into a heart, and Celia was rushing to finish two deadlines before 3:30. The internet at home had been down, so she was working at her mom’s, while Madison painted colorful smudges on every scrap of paper her grandmother gave her. By

I grew up invisible in my own house, like a shadow nobody noticed. After my mother died, my father remarried, and in that second marriage, I became nothing more than an afterthought. So years later, when my stepmother passed away, the last thing I ever expected was for her to leave me anything. The shock came in a quiet lawyer’s office, when Mr. Whitman slid a thick envelope across a polished mahogany desk. My palms turned sweaty as I reached for it. I had thought this was going to be