I had built an empire on my ability to read them.

And I had looked into Chloe’s face for two years and seen love, and it had been, the entire time, a calculation, performed so well that I had staked my life on it.

That was the true horror of those five days, worse than the betrayals of the cousin and the lawyer and the politician.

It was learning, lying still, exactly how completely I had been fooled by the person closest to me.

I have replayed those two years many times since, looking for the moment I should have seen it, the crack in the performance I should have caught, and the most unsettling conclusion I have reached is that there wasn’t one.