The Chicago story had texture; it had a difficult colleague and a hotel gym and a running joke about the coffee.

He built it the way I build a room, with an eye for the detail that makes the whole thing feel real.

And I sat there and admired the countertop and asked him a question about his fictional client, and watched him answer without a flicker, and I thought: I have been eating dinner across from this for years, and I called it a marriage.

Chapter 3 — The Small Things

The truth is I had been noticing things for weeks and filing them under work stress, the way you do when you don’t yet want to know.

Late-night texts that lit up his phone face-down on the nightstand.