So I decided, in the cold gray of that first married morning, that I would not accuse.

I would test.

There was a coldness to that decision that surprised me, given how frightened I was, but I have come to think that the coldness was a mercy, a way my mind protected itself and the people I loved from my own uncertainty.

If I had let my terror run, I would have screamed the accusation the moment I first suspected, and if I had been wrong I would never have been forgiven, and rightly so.

So I made myself into something I had never been before: patient, watchful, methodical, a woman gathering evidence against the man she slept beside.