Chapter 1 — You Forgot to End the Call

“Darling.

You forgot to end the video call.”

Barrett spun around in his chair so fast he almost knocked the laptop to the floor.

On the screen, more than thirty windows from the monthly Thornton Global executive meeting were still open, still lit, still live.

Thirty employees were looking at just what I was looking at.

Selina, his assistant, was sitting on his lap, her blouse half unbuttoned, and around her neck hung a diamond necklace.

I knew that necklace at once.

I had stood in front of it two months earlier, in a jeweler’s window on Rittenhouse Square, and told my husband how much I loved it.

It cost a hundred and ten thousand dollars.

“That is an absurd amount of money,” Barrett had said to me then.

“You don’t work anymore, Simone.

What would you even need something like that for?”

We had eaten plain soup for dinner that night, because he told me we had to be very careful with money on account of the mortgage.

Now the same necklace was around another woman’s throat, glittering under the office lights, in front of thirty of his own employees, on a call he had forgotten to end.

I did not scream, or cry, or say his name.

I have wondered often since why not, and the closest I can come to an answer is that some part of me had been quietly waiting for this exact image for a very long time without admitting to myself that I was waiting.

Not the necklace, specifically.