And it had one flaw, which is that it was built round my money arriving safely rather than round me.
I stayed in that house for four months to protect a transfer.
I had nineteen million dollars in a trust and I waited for a six-digit code from a bank.
And the night before the plan, the thing Cressida had told me would happen, happened.
Georgiana.
I have thought a great deal about the Thursday.
About a woman of sixty-six walking into a department store on a weekday afternoon, and going to the counter she has clearly been to before, and choosing a box, and charging it to her own account.
Knowing what it was for.
Knowing it would be needed by Sunday.
And I asked Cressida, in the October, whether Georgiana had bought hers as well, in 2016.
And she said: “I never checked. I never looked for a receipt. I didn’t even take the ribbon off.”
And then she said: “It didn’t occur to me that it was bought before. I thought he went out in the night and got it. I thought it was an apology.”
We both thought it was an apology.
It was a supply.
And Cressida’s reckoning, which she told me about at the third lunch and which I had not expected.
