I want to tell you about that afternoon, because it was the strangest few hours of my life.

I had spent the morning in a conference room signing the papers that made me the majority owner of my husband’s company, sitting across from Thurston Osgood and a table of lawyers, being entirely Celestine Ingram — sharp, precise, in command of a nine-figure transaction.

And then I had driven home to the house I shared with Lucan, and changed into a blue silk dress, and become, for a few more hours, the decorative wife he expected to bring to his party.

I remember standing in front of the mirror in our bedroom, doing up the strap of that dress, looking at my own face and thinking that in a few hours the two halves of my life, which I had kept in separate sealed rooms for three years, were finally going to collide in a hotel ballroom, and that after tonight there would be no more decorative wife.

It was like preparing to shed a skin.

Lucan came in while I was getting ready and told me not to embarrass him at the party, to smile and be pleasant to the board members, to remember that tonight was important for his career.