My son had heard his father say, to a plane full of strangers, that a stranger meant everything to him and that a new life was beginning — a new life that did not, by any reading of those words, contain us.

Leo was seven.

He did not know the word mistress or the word affair. But he knew, the way children always know, that something had just broken, and that it had broken over the sound of his father’s voice, the voice he loved best in the world, coming down from the speakers he had been so proud of.

Chapter 7 — Who Is Chloe

The cabin erupted around us into cheers and applause for the lucky woman in first class, and the sound of it was obscene, a celebration roaring over the two people it was quietly destroying.