It was the smoothness that told me who he really was.

I could have survived learning that my husband had fallen for someone else; people fall, hearts are unreliable, and a man who came to me ashamed and honest would have gotten, at least, my respect on the way out the door.

But Julian did not stammer.

He did not flush.

He did not have the decency of a guilty man caught off guard.

He heard his own son’s testimony repeated back to him at his own dinner table, and without a half-second’s hesitation he reached down, picked up that little boy’s innocence, and used it as a tool — ghost-hunter shows, a blonde maid, he built a whole story out of it — turning Leo’s honesty into evidence of Leo’s confusion, so smoothly that if I had not seen the necklace with my own eyes I might have believed him.