Chapter 1 — The Announcement

Seconds before they called my boarding group, I posted one last thing to the account the whole company followed, and then I put the phone in my coat and waited for it to begin.

I’m divorcing my husband, effective today.

That was all it said.

Nine words.

I had written and deleted longer versions for three weeks, versions with grievances and evidence and the shape of everything he had done, and in the end I let all of it go and posted the nine words, because the nine words were the only part that was mine to say in public and because I knew exactly where my husband was while I said it.

Flynn was at St.

Catherine’s Hospital, across the city, standing beside his mistress as she gave birth to his child.

My phone rang before the post had been live thirty seconds.

I let it buzz against my ribs for a moment before I took it out, because I wanted to feel, just once, what it was to make him wait.

“Don’t you dare get on that plane,” Flynn said.

He did not say hello.

Behind his voice I could hear a newborn crying, thin and furious, and a woman’s voice — Selina’s — calling to him to come back into the room, to not leave her, not now.

I looked through the terminal glass at the private jet waiting on the rain-bright tarmac, its lights smearing gold across the wet asphalt.

“You chose your family, Flynn,” I said.

“I’m choosing mine.”

“You have nothing without me,” he said, and there it was, the sentence he had been telling me in a hundred quieter forms for six years, said now plainly at last, because he was frightened.

“Nothing, Mabel.