Neither of us had been alone in a room for five years.

That is it.

That is the thing.

Not poverty, exactly, although it was tight.

The complete and total elimination of any hour in which either of us was a person rather than a function, sustained for five years, with no visible end, because the youngest was nine months old and the arithmetic went out to 2028.

Maren started with a man named Gideon Frayne in the February of 2010.

He was not her boss; he was a regional vice president two levels above her, and he was forty-seven, and he had a house in Granite Bay and a divorce behind him and time.