Chapter 1 — Two Hours Before

“Sign the divorce papers before they open up your skull.

If you don’t wake up, at least Claudia and I can get married without any red tape.”

Those were my husband’s exact words to me, two hours before I was wheeled in for brain surgery.

My name is Camila Vance.

I am forty-five years old, and for fifteen years I believed I was married to an imperfect but fundamentally decent man.

That morning, in a private hospital room in Chicago, I lay waiting for Alejandro to come in, take my hand, and tell me it was going to be all right.

That was all I wanted from him.

Not reassurance I could believe, necessarily — just the performance of a husband who was frightened for his wife.

I would have accepted the performance gladly.

I had been accepting performances for fifteen years.

Instead he walked in wearing a brand-new tailored suit and a cloud of expensive cologne, carrying a leather portfolio.

“Why are you dressed like that?” I asked.

My voice came out raspy; they had already started the pre-operative medications, and my mouth was dry.

“I have an important business lunch,” he said, smoothly, as though the timing of it were the most natural thing in the world.

He drew several pages out of the folder and laid them directly on my hospital sheet, over my legs, where I would have to look at them.

And the heart monitor beside my bed, which does not know how to lie the way a face does, began to beep faster, marking out in sound the thing I was not yet letting myself feel.

Chapter 2 — Claudia