Because the affair was a matter of the heart, but the shell company and the transfers were a matter of planning, of months and months of deliberate, patient, sober decisions made in daylight.

The affair told me Julian did not love me.

The money told me something far colder.

It told me that he had spent two years building a future in which Leo and I were not merely unloved but disposable, in which we could be discarded without cost to him, because by the time we understood what was happening, there would be nothing left to fight over.

And that thought, once I let myself finish it, changed everything about how I felt.