The woman I had thrown out of my house in the middle of a thunderstorm without giving her a single minute to say a word in her own defense.

I reached into my wallet, crushed a fifty-dollar bill into a tight ball, and threw it out the window.

It landed in a muddy puddle, right in front of her worn boots.

“What happened to your millionaire, Lucy?” I sneered.

“Did he kick you to the curb too?”

She looked down at the bill floating in the mud.

Then she raised her eyes, slowly, to meet mine.

“Keep your money, Alexander,” she said, and her voice was terrifyingly calm.

“You might need it to buy yourself a little peace, on the day you finally understand what kind of monster you’ve become.”

She pushed the money deeper into the mud with the toe of her boot, and she kept walking.

Chapter 2 — The Story I Told Myself

To understand why I was capable of that, out a truck window in the rain, you have to understand the three years that came before it, and the story I had been telling myself for every one of them.

The story went like this.

My wife had betrayed me.