Chapter 1 — What Is She Doing Here?

“What is she doing here?”

The tremor in Bianca’s voice was so sharp that I pulled my eyes off the arrivals board and looked at my fiancée instead.

We had just landed at O’Hare after five years of my life in Vancouver, coming home to Chicago to get ready for a December wedding my mother had already half-planned without me — the caterers, the guest list, the band, the seating chart, all of it spinning along in her capable hands two thousand miles away while I signed off on things over the phone.

All of that went out of my head the moment I saw the woman on her knees beside a yellow mop bucket, wiping down the tile near an airport coffee stand.

Samantha.

My ex-wife.

Five years ago we had signed our divorce papers after months of arguments that had worn us both down to nothing.

Two weeks after that I left the country, sure I was closing the worst chapter of my life for good.

And now here she was in front of me in a janitorial uniform, her hair tied back, a few new lines at the corners of her eyes that hadn’t been there when I knew her.

I want to be honest about the version of events I had carried to Vancouver and back, because it matters to everything that came after.

In my telling, our marriage had simply failed — two people who wanted different things, ground down by years of trying for a child that never came, until there was nothing left but the fighting.

It was nobody’s fault, or it was both our faults, which came to the same comfortable place.

I had built that story carefully and lived inside it for five years, and it had let me sleep.

What I did not know, standing in that terminal, was that almost every load-bearing beam of it was a lie somebody else had built for me, and that I had moved into the house without once checking whether the foundation was real.

“Samantha,” I said.

Chapter 2 — No Honest Work

She looked up.