I was thinking about passport numbers.

I was thinking about whether we would make our dinner reservation and whether Dalton would be annoyed that I had let myself in while he was working.

I was, in the most literal sense, thinking about the honeymoon.

That is how these things actually happen.

They do not announce themselves.

The worst discoveries of our lives arrive dressed as errands, on ordinary Thursdays, while we are worrying about something small.

I have come to think there is a kind of mercy in that, though it did not feel like mercy at the time — that we are spared the dread, and simply handed the truth, whole, in a single unprepared instant, with no time to have talked ourselves back out of seeing it.

Chapter 2 — What I Found

The study was empty.

The voices came from the front room, and I followed them, and then I stopped in the archway and did not move, because the thing in front of me could not be rearranged into anything harmless.

Catalina was on the floor.

She was twenty-two years old, Dalton’s housekeeper, a quiet young woman I had met perhaps a dozen times and had liked without ever really knowing — she always offered me coffee, always asked about my day as though she meant it.

Now she was kneeling on the marble, her hands pressed flat over her stomach, her face wet.

And Dalton stood over her in his navy suit, unruffled, his hands in his pockets, wearing the same calm expression he wore across a negotiating table.