“Mrs. Thompson?” A man in a gray suit waited until the last handful of soil hit wood. “Jeffrey Palmer. Palmer, Woodson & Hayes. Richard’s attorney. The reading will be at the penthouse in an hour. Your presence is requested.”

“At the house?” The words sounded like they belonged to the rain. “That’s… soon.”

“Amanda—Mrs. Conrad‑Thompson—was insistent.” He corrected himself with the reflex of a man who knows where the center of the room is now.

Of course she was. Amanda loved theater almost as much as she loved the audience for it. Richard had believed himself happy with her, and after cancer took his father five years earlier, I had learned to let happiness sit where it landed. But there had always been math in her eyes—columns and totals hidden under the glow.

The Fifth Avenue penthouse sailed over Central Park like a glass ship. Richard bought it before her; she remade it after. Books banished. Angles everywhere. Seating that punished the idea of sinking in. Fashion friends, board members, glossy strangers drifted through as if this were a launch party instead of a wake.