Five years earlier, Chloe had stood barefoot in my kitchen in my husband’s shirt, and had looked at me with the particular triumph of a woman who believes she has won something, who believes she has taken a prize.

She had thought, I am sure, that she was claiming a great love, that she and Marcus shared something real enough to justify the wreckage they made of my marriage.

And here, five years later, at the first sound of consequences, that great love revealed itself for what it had always been: a transaction, a mutual convenience between two people who valued themselves far more than they valued each other, dissolving the instant it stopped being profitable.

There is a grim justice in that, and it required nothing from me.