That was not even the part that stopped my breath.

Below the golf charges ran a second pattern: recurring monthly transfers, totaling four thousand five hundred dollars over three months, sent directly to a woman named Valerie P.

The memo line on each read, blandly, personal business expenses.

I knew the name the instant I saw it.

Valerie worked at Brandon’s regional marketing firm.

And as I sat there staring at those transfers, a memory surfaced and clicked into place beside them — three months earlier, Rosalind had insisted, with a strange and specific firmness I had not understood at the time, that I should stay home rather than accompany Brandon on an out-of-town corporate retreat.

One by one, the small unexplained wrongnesses of the past year turned and locked into a single, coherent shape.