He had told her the marriage was over, the papers drawn, the apartment in South Boston rented; he had sold her a future with the same fluent ease he’d used to sell me a conference in Chicago.

She was twenty-nine and she had believed a charming older man exactly the way I had believed him at that age, and she was about to pay for it in the same currency I was.

I did not warm to her, precisely.

But I stopped hating her, there in Row 7, and I felt something more complicated instead: the strange, cold kinship of two people discovering they’ve been reading from different pages of the same forged book.

Chapter 11 — Two Versions of the Same Lie

The plane began its slow taxi toward the runway.