I stood where a wife is meant to stand.

I smiled at the people Damian wanted me to smile at, and I let the evening assemble itself around his expectations, and I waited.

Because I knew something the room did not.

I knew what the announcement was actually going to be.

I had known for weeks, and I had known for certain since that afternoon, when the last of the documents were signed in a lawyer’s office across the city and a transaction that would rearrange every life in this ballroom quietly became final.

My husband thought he was about to be handed a company.

He had no idea that the company had already been handed to someone else, or that the someone else was standing beside him in a blue silk dress, smiling, holding a glass she had not yet touched.

I had carried that glass all evening precisely so that my hands would have something to do that was not trembling.

It is an old trick, and a good one.

A woman holding a glass looks composed; a woman with empty hands has nowhere to put them, and nerves travel straight to the fingers.

My mother had taught me that, among a hundred other quiet things, and I had thought of her as I picked it up.

Chapter 2 — The Woman in the Red Gown

Camilla Price stood a few feet away, close enough to Damian that no one could mistake the arrangement and far enough that both of them could pretend, if pressed, that there was nothing to mistake.

She was Cardinal’s communications director, and for the better part of a year she had been appearing at Damian’s side — at conferences, at client dinners, at the “emergency strategy retreats” that seemed to require only the two of them and a hotel with a good spa.