His brother’s wife.

The woman he had spent two years holding up in front of me as everything I had failed to be.

The elegant, luminous, put-together goddess he compared me to over dinner while I fell asleep at the table.

That woman.

He had not been admiring her from a respectful distance.

He had been sleeping with her — for six months, I would learn — while both of us, Reid and I, kept the two of them fed and housed and believed in.

The comparison was the part that took my breath, once I understood it, because it meant the cruelty had been engineered.