Chapter 1 — Who Taught You to Hold Me Like That

“If you pretend you don’t know anything, you can go on being my wife.”

Spencer said it in the dark, in a voice so calm it chilled me more than any confession could have.

I had only asked him a small question.

On his first night home, after three years away, he had come to bed and wrapped his arm tight around my waist and held me against him all night — a thing he had never once done in all our years of marriage.

“Who taught you to sleep like that?” I asked him, softly.

His arm slid off me at once, as though I had caught it doing something.

He got up, walked out onto the balcony, and lit a cigarette.

“Cordelia, there are things I don’t tell you because you don’t need to know them,” he said to the night.

“Bianca isn’t like other women.

If you don’t make a scene, she’ll never trouble you.”

Just like that.

No shame in it anywhere.

As though I were the intruder in my own marriage, and he was being generous to let me stay.

I stepped out onto the balcony beside him.

“Then make a choice,” I said.

“It’s her, or it’s me.”

Spencer set his jaw and said nothing at all, and in that silence I understood the choice had been made long ago, in another city, and that I had simply not been informed.