Chapter 1 — The Hospital Corridor

“What are you doing here?”

Brenda’s voice cracked across the hospital corridor, too loud for the place, and heads turned — two nurses paused, a family in the waiting area looked up.

Her face was pale, her hair undone, her blouse buttoned wrong by a hole.

I had only ever seen her immaculate: flawless heels, perfect makeup, that bright manufactured smile she wore around the office.

The woman in front of me now looked like someone the polished version had been built to hide.

“Keep your voice down,” I told her, level and quiet.

“We’re in a hospital.” She was my husband’s secretary, and it was no accident that I was standing outside this particular room — the room of Andrew, her husband, a man I had never met until that morning, a man who had called me out of nowhere and said the words that had brought me here.

I did not raise my voice, and I did not flinch, and I watched the fury build in her face as she understood that I was not going to give her the scene she wanted.

It had all started three days earlier, over something small enough to miss.

A car window I’d left rolled down, and a forecast that promised rain.

Chapter 2 — Three Days Earlier

Mark, my husband of twenty-eight years, had told me he would spend that Saturday showing prime parcels to a group of investors flying in from Chicago.

He came home before lunch instead, pale and wound tight as wire.

“Terrible migraine,” he muttered.

“Canceled everything.” And he shut himself in our bedroom.

I went down to the garage because I’d remembered leaving one of the car windows down, and rain was coming, and when I opened the passenger door a wave of heavy sweet perfume rolled out at me — the exact scent that hung in the office elevator every time Brenda stepped off it.

And then I saw it: a piece of black lace, tucked half under the seat.