“What’s the matter, sweetheart?” I said.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

I had thought, on the way up in the elevator, about what I wanted from this moment, and I want to be honest that at first I had wanted the cinematic thing — the gasp, the fainting, the villain undone by the sheer theater of the dead returning.

But standing in that doorway watching the color leave my husband’s face, I found I wanted something quieter and much more precise.

I did not want him to be shocked. I wanted him to understand. I wanted him to run, in the space of a few seconds, the whole calculation he must have been running — how, when, what she knows, what she has — and to arrive, at the end of it, at the one conclusion that had no exit: that the recording existed, that the seatbelt existed, that the police behind me existed, and that there was no version of the next hour in which he walked out of this room a free man.