You don’t imagine that the person you carried through her worst year is quietly dismantling your life.

I didn’t want to suspect her.

Because here is the thing about a friendship of twelve years, the thing that made this different from an ordinary affair: Valentina was not a woman my husband met at a bar.

She was the person who knew me.

She had been my roommate and my maid of honor and the first call after every good thing and every bad thing for over a decade.

She knew the name of my childhood dog and the exact way my mother could wound me and the thing I was most ashamed of from my twenties.