We flew the rest of the way in a silence that was, strangely, the most honest hour Isabela and I had ever spent together.

There was no performance left to give.

The careful courtship, the correct wedding, the merger our families had assembled us to complete — all of it had been detonated by a single photograph, and in the crater left behind, the two of us could finally speak plainly.

She did not rage at me, and I did not grovel.

We sat with the wreckage like two people surveying a building that had burned down around them, and found, underneath the shock, an unexpected relief that neither of us could quite admit yet.

The building had been a prison for both of us.