In the three years since Allen Morgan had married into the Hobbs family, he had grown accustomed to the distinct, biting cold of domestic exile. On those formal occasions when the extended family gathered for birthdays or anniversaries, Jane Hobbs would treat him as an inconvenient piece of furniture. She would habitually leave him behind in the quiet, drafty halls of the Hobbs villa, tossing him a pittance for food as if she were paying a parking meter.
Allen recalled, with a faint, wry bitterness, the only time Jane had ever handed him a one-hundred-dollar bill. It had only happened because Christian Hobbs had begged and pleaded with her mother before the family left for a week-long vacation. That single hundred-dollar bill had been his entire life support for seven days; he had survive
