The affair had been expensive, and I had been funding it.

I sat there in Farah’s kitchen at two in the morning doing arithmetic on my own betrayal, and the number kept climbing, and somewhere in that climbing the last of my heartbreak finished turning into something harder and far more useful.

There is a specific humiliation in seeing your betrayal itemized, and it is different from the humiliation of the betrayal itself.

To learn your husband slept with your friend is to be wounded.

To scroll through a bank statement and see, in neat chronological rows, the hotel where they slept together, the restaurant where he took her after, the bracelet he bought her, the flights, the rent — all of it paid from the account where I had been depositing my salary and my carefulness and my faith in our shared future — is to be audited. Each line was a small receipt for a lie I had lived inside.

That weekend he told me he was at a conference: here is the resort.