Notes to himself on how to describe me to his colleagues, to his family, to their mutual friends: unstable, unfaithful, impossible to live with.

A whole quiet architecture of lies about my character, composed at his office and revised like legal briefs, while he came home every night and ate dinner at my table and let me pour his coffee in the morning.

Ione read one, and then another, and the color that came into her face was not grief.

It was disgust.

“You rehearsed this,” she said.

“You sat in your office and drafted how to destroy your wife’s name.”