PART 1 — THE POCKET

I woke up the morning after my wedding happier than I could remember being in years.

Everything felt settled.

Safe.

For once, my life had arrived somewhere instead of threatening to fall apart.

Then I put my hand inside my husband’s tuxedo pocket.

And within seconds, every fear I thought I had outgrown came rushing back.

Callum was still asleep in our honeymoon suite, buried beneath a white hotel duvet with one bare arm stretched across the pillow where I had been lying.

I stood beside the armchair wearing nothing but a hotel robe.

His black tuxedo lay across the chair exactly where he had thrown it at two in the morning.

Twenty-four hours earlier, he had stood beneath strings of warm garden lights and promised me that whatever happened in our marriage, we would never build a life around secrets.

Now I was holding his jacket as though it might contain evidence that those promises had already been broken.

My name is Valerie.

I was twenty-seven years old.

And before Callum, I had become almost embarrassingly skilled at discovering things men believed they had hidden well.

Darren had kept a second phone in the glove compartment of his car.

Mitchell introduced me repeatedly to a woman he called his cousin.

She was actually his fiancée.

By twenty-three, I had developed what my best friend Felicia called: