My hand went into my bag and found my phone and lifted it and opened the camera, all before my fear could catch up and tell me to be careful, to be quiet, to think about what this meant for the wedding and the villa and the life I had spent a year assembling.

Some older instinct — eight years of it, the part of me Dalton had never bothered to learn — simply started recording from the shadow of the archway, because it knew, before the rest of me did, that what was happening in that room was evidence.

I want to be honest about what those seconds were actually like, standing there, because “I started recording” makes it sound clean and brave and it was neither.

Half of me was somewhere far away, watching my own life crack down the middle.

The man in that room was the man I had chosen — had said yes to, had planned a future with, had defended to the friends who found him a little cold.

There is a specific vertigo in watching someone you love reveal themselves to be someone you have never met, a feeling like the floor tilting while everyone insists it is level.