His Wife's Money

A gilded cage of moonlit pines enfolds Marion Phillips—heiress incognito—when storm-crack twigs hurl her into the rough-hewn sanctuary of Richard Flint’s Adirondack lodge. Their first glance is a spark struck on flint: two strangers silhouetted by firelight, breathing the same resinous hush. Marriage follows before dawn’s disclosure of Marion’s dynastic millions, and the idyll curdles under crystal chandeliers that refract her friends’ mockery of Richard’s calloused palms. Pride flays him; he flees to a subterranean world where pickaxes ring like verdicts. Marion, abandoned amid ore-dust and echo, allows urbane predator James Cardwell to ferry her back to velvet soirées. Beneath the earth Richard’s pick strikes pay-dirt; above it, he metamorphoses into a Wall Street juggernaut, shorting the very securities that gild his wife’s name. Fortunes implode along with Cardwell’s smirk, and in the smoky aftermath the couple confronts the exquisite ruin they have authored—two hearts stripped to the quick, reconciling in the hush of a bankrupt dawn.