Chapter 1 — Jessica Bennett

“Jessica Bennett,” Mike drawled, letting my maiden name roll off his tongue like a mild insult.

“I honestly didn’t think you had the nerve to actually show up.”

Five years since the divorce, and the first thing out of his mouth was my name worn like a joke he was letting me in on.

He had a full glass of something amber in one hand and a woman on his other side, and he wore the easy, expensive confidence of a man who had spent those five years being told he was doing very well.

The woman smiled at me over the crystal rim of her champagne flute.

It was a smile built for my benefit, all teeth and no warmth, the kind of smile that is really a message.

“Mike mentioned you tend to avoid family events,” she said.

“Something about crowds making you anxious?”

“I avoid unnecessary events,” I said, holding her gaze without blinking.

“Rachel is my oldest friend.

This one was mandatory.”

Mike chuckled, a dry, abrasive little sound I had once found charming and had learned, over seven years of marriage, to hear for what it was.

His eyes dragged down my simple dress and back up, taking inventory, pricing me.

“Still working the front desk at that little county clinic?”

He had always had a gift for it — for making cruelty sound like banter, for wrapping a knife in enough of a grin that if you flinched, you were the one who couldn’t take a joke.

I had forgotten, in five years, how precise it was.

Standing there in the warm gold of the reception, I remembered all of it at once, the whole grammar of being married to a man who could hurt you and smile and make you feel unreasonable for bleeding.