While my husband lied about a “business trip” to vacation in Maui with his mistress, I was alone in the hospital watching his mother take her final breaths. When the mistress picked up my phone call to mock me, Margaret heard it all. Fueled by a lifetime of her son’s neglect, she gave me a secret silver key and a single instruction: “Destroy him.” Now, his tropical paradise is about to burn.

I unzipped my suitcase and retrieved a battered tablet, a device Mark and I used to share before he upgraded to newer models. The moment it connected to the motel’s unstable Wi-Fi, a barrage of synced email notifications flooded the lock screen. Mark, possessing the technological prowess of a stone, had never unlinked his primary alert email from this device.

A subject line caught my eye. Charge Authorized: Grand Wailea Resort, Maui – $3,500. The timestamp aligned flawlessly with the exact minute Margaret’s heart had stopped beating.

I tapped a messaging app that was still logged in. A text from Mark’s sister, Susan, sat unread. She had cowardly skipped the funeral, citing a migraine. “Claire, is Mark actually in Boston? A friend of mine just saw him at the Honolulu airport with some blonde girl. This has to be a mistake, right?”

His arrogant, sloppily constructed lies were already hemorrhaging. I remembered the vile treatment I had endured from his relatives just hours ago at the memorial service. Uncle Richard, smelling of stale beer and cheap cologne, had barked, “A funeral barren of the eldest son is a profound disgrace. You clearly failed to contact him, Claire!”