He had given it to me years earlier, during a week when he was recovering from surgery and needed me to check his business email, and he had never thought to change it, because it had never occurred to him that his wife might one day have a reason to look.

That, I would come to understand, was the whole shape of the thing.

Julian had built his second life entirely on the assumption that I would never look, and that assumption was itself a kind of contempt, a quiet certainty that I was too trusting, or too dull, or too devoted to be a threat.

I opened his private messaging application, and I found the thread with a woman named Chloe.

I will not describe the messages in any detail, because there is no need, and because they were not what a person might expect.