That night he said the meeting ran late: here is the restaurant, and here, an hour later, the hotel.

My marriage, rendered as a ledger, turned out to be a document I could read backward to find every place I’d been deceived, priced to the dollar.

And the strange mercy of it — the thing Farah had known when she told me to open the laptop — was that a ledger cannot break your heart the way a memory can.

It can only inform you.

Somewhere around the third luxury-hotel charge, I stopped feeling like a wife reading about her husband’s affair and started feeling like an accountant finding fraud, and the shift was the beginning of my survival.

You cannot win a heartbreak.