It was a sound assumption, based on years of accurate observation.

It was also, as of that particular freezing December afternoon, about to become the most expensive miscalculation of his life.

Because what Julian did not know, as he walked away smiling toward his warm cabin and his brother’s wife, was that the obedient wife he had trained had stopped being obedient some weeks ago, quietly, without announcement, and that the tote bag on her shoulder contained the end of everything he had.

The transformation had happened two months earlier, and it had not happened all at once, the way it does in stories, with a slap or a scream or a slammed door.