Part One

Chapter 1 — The Farewell Illusion

Torrential Atlanta rain brought a damp chill into our high-rise apartment in the heart of Buckhead. I stood at the floor-to-ceiling windows, watching the droplets fracture against the glass, an icy unease tightening around my heart.

Behind me, the usual quiet of my home was broken by the loud laughter of my in-laws.

An hour earlier I had dropped my husband, Everett, at Hartsfield-Jackson. We’d shed a few tears before he walked away. He was supposedly heading to London for a four-year corporate assignment — a sacrifice, he said, for the sake of our future.

But after seven years of marriage, my instincts were screaming that the story I’d been fed was rotten to the core.

The deception had begun three nights earlier.

That is what I believed at the time. I want that noted here, at the top, because it turned out to be wrong by about two years, and because everything I did in the weeks that followed was built on it.

Chapter 2 — The Announcement

Everett had personally driven to collect his parents, Walter and Shirley, from their small town in Ohio. They arrived with the full countryside cliché — homemade jams, pickled vegetables, carefully wrapped farm eggs.

There were twenty-nine jars. I counted them while I was finding places for them, and I was irritated by them, and I thought: who brings twenty-nine jars to a visit.

At first glance it looked like a happy reunion, but there was a restless, evasive energy in their eyes.

Dinner that night was elaborate. I’d left my marketing firm early to slow-roast a pot roast and stir Everett’s favorite wild-mushroom risotto. He sat at the head of the table, pouring a heavy Napa Cabernet for his father, a permanent smile glued to his jaw.

He cleared his throat and set his glass down with a thud that commanded the room.

“Mom, Dad, Stella,” he began, his voice heavy with rehearsed gravity. “I have something monumental to announce. The board is sending a key executive to London to run our new European branch for four years.