Frame it to the partners as her instability, not my absence. He had not been swept away by anything.

He had been project-managing my destruction with the same cold competence he brought to a deposition, and doing it at night, at home, ten feet from where I slept.

That was the thing that turned the room.

You could see it move across their faces — the junior associates, the cousins, the people who had laughed at his joke ten minutes earlier — the slow horror of realizing that the charming man they had toasted was not a flawed romantic but a genuinely calculating one, and that the woman at the back table, the one they had all agreed not to look at, had been telling a truth none of them had bothered to ask her for.

Chapter 9 — The Wedding Is Over

“It basically was over,” Kingston said, his voice climbing toward a pitch I recognized — the sound he made when he had lost control of a room and knew it.