Even the timing of the affair itself, its sudden carelessness near the end, the photograph sent to the wrong number: I wondered, afterward, whether some part of it had been almost deliberate, a controlled demolition, a scandal offered up to occupy me so thoroughly with my own heartbreak that I would never think to audit the books.

A betrayed wife looks at her marriage.

She does not look at her ledgers.

Damon had understood that about grief, the way he understood everything about me after years of study, and he had used it.

The affair was not only his appetite.

It was, in its way, a magician’s flourish — the bright, painful thing in the one hand, waved about to keep my eyes off the quiet, patient work of the other.

I had spent eight months mourning the wrong crime.