This was a conspiracy, and its target was not just my marriage.

It was Tommy.

I need to be precise about why that recording changed everything for me, because up to the moment I heard it, I had still been carrying some soft foolish hope — the hope every betrayed person carries — that this was a man who had gotten lost, who had made a terrible human mess of wanting something, who was weak rather than cruel.

That hope died in my parents’ dining room.