In two years of her talking about “our next chapter” and “the life we’ll build,” I had come to picture that house as a place two people would grow old in.

And here she was, on the very evening the wedding died, moving through it not like a heartbroken bride saying goodbye to a dream but like a burglar who knew exactly where the good things were kept — because that is what she had always been, in every warm dinner and every talk about the future.

She had been casing my life.

Every time she’d asked, sweetly, where I kept the important papers, “so I’d know, God forbid something happened to you,” she had been drawing a map.