“You think I chose this moment?

She chose it.

She made me promise.”

And in the space of those few seconds, every horrible theory I had ever entertained came rushing back all at once, jostling for room in my spinning head.

He did it for money, said one.

He married her because he could never have you, and she was the closest substitute, said another, the cruelest one, the one that made my own face hot with shame even as I thought it.

I stood there against that cold wall and let five years of buried suspicion crest over me in a single wave, and I hated myself for it, and I could not stop it.