So I will give you the facts, which are damning enough on their own, and I will keep the rest, and I would ask you to trust that the keeping is not evasion but a kind of dignity — the one thing that car did not manage to take from either of us.

Chapter 2 — The Woman on the Bank

Through the sinking glass I could see him pulling himself up onto the muddy bank.

And he was not alone.

A woman stood waiting for him under a wide umbrella, dry, unhurried.

It was Sabine.

My half-sister.

And even from the water, even through the glass, I could see that she was pregnant.

I watched Callum reach the bank and put his arm around her waist.

I watched her lift a hand and stroke his cheek, the way you touch someone you have loved for a long time and are relieved to be safe beside.

And then the two of them simply stood there, side by side under the umbrella, and watched our car go down.

He smiled.

That is the image I could not put down for a long time afterward — not the water, not the wire, but my husband smiling on the bank with my sister under his arm, watching me sink.

Three years of marriage.