It would have been one thing — still a betrayal, still devastating — for two people to fall into an affair, and be found out, and feel the weight of what they had done, and move slowly and carefully through the wreckage they had caused, out of some remaining respect for the years and the children and the person they had hurt.

That is not what Luca and Chloe did.

They moved fast, and publicly, and without apparent shame, announcing their engagement while I was still pregnant with the child of the marriage they were dismantling, planning a lavish celebration of the exact thing that was destroying my family.

The speed was itself a message.

It said, more clearly than any words, that my feelings were not a factor they had bothered to weigh — that my grief was not, to them, an obstacle deserving of even a decent interval.

They were not moving through wreckage.