The taste of champagne, once a celebratory indulgence, now felt like a bitter poison coating Eleanor’s tongue. As Simone Dubois, she circulated through the opulent rooms of her Parisian mansion, a ghost in her own life, a wolf in silk. The mourners, or rather, the vultures, had begun to thin. The mandatory show of grief was over, and the business of inheritance, of picking clean the bones of Simone’s life, had begun in earnest.