She just said the true thing, in a level voice, and watched it land.

Chapter 3 — He Signs

I came out of the kitchen then.

I didn’t shout.

I’d done all my shouting privately, months earlier, into a pillow and a phone and my sister’s voicemail, and I’d come out the other side of it into something steadier and colder than rage.\n\nWhat had changed me was not the affair.

Affairs are ordinary; half the women I know have survived one.

What changed me was watching him decide, in real time, that our fifteen-year-old was a resource to be spent.