It is a lonely thing, to look across a room at someone you have slept beside for a decade and realize you are seeing them, truly seeing them, for the first time.

Chapter 17 — The Woman in Champagne Silk

And then I saw her, across the room.

Chloe.

I knew her at once, though we had never met, because I had spent four days with her dark hair and her posture burned into my memory from a photograph taken through a window.

She was wearing a champagne-colored silk dress and a diamond pendant, and she was younger even than she had looked in the photo, late twenties at the most, polished and poised and confident in the way of someone who has been told her whole life that rooms belong to her.

And her eyes, through all the speeches and the mingling, kept returning to one place.