The message just gave me permission.

And so I sat there, calm as a woman filling out a form, and did the thing that would end my marriage and my oldest friendship in a single stroke, and the calm frightened me far more than any amount of shaking would have — because it meant that somewhere underneath, in the place that knows things before you let yourself know them, I had already left.

Chapter 2 — Proof

For a long time something had been wrong — the last-minute meetings, the sudden trips, the odd, hungry way Valentina had started asking about Damian whenever we talked.

Two years earlier, when her marriage ended and her husband left her for someone younger, I was the one who sat on her bathroom floor while she cried, who paid for the good lawyer, who let her sleep in my guest room for a month.

That was exactly why I hadn’t let myself imagine it.