Something colder than grief had taken over — the strange, clarifying calm of a person who has just learned that the disaster was not an accident but a design, that she had not stumbled into a bad marriage but been selected for one, appraised like a property, six years before she’d known his name meant anything.

Every tender moment of our courtship, every gesture I’d catalogued as evidence that I was loved — I watched them all turn over in my mind and show their other faces.

He had not fallen for me.

He had scouted me.

I had spent five years believing myself to be, if nothing else, loved — believing that whatever was wrong between us, the beginning at least had been real, that a man had once looked at me across a room and felt something true.

That was the belief the message took from me, standing there in the gray light.