She didn’t just engineer an affair.

She built my husband a whole alternate family and then walked the two of them into it.

I want to be fair about Cassie, even now, because the drive made me fair about her whether I wanted to be or not.

She wasn’t the architect of anything. She was another person Victoria had found at her weakest and quietly bought — a frightened woman handed exactly the lifeline she needed, by someone who made sure she never saw the hook inside it.

I don’t think Cassie ever knew about the shell accounts, or understood that the man being nudged into her life had been engineered lonely on purpose.

She thought she’d found love in a hard year.