Chapter 9 — The Phone

“Give me your phone,” I said.

Yvette hesitated — just for a second, the last flicker of self-protection — and then she slid it across the table to me, because she knew, I think, that handing it over was the only thing left she could do that meant anything.

I scrolled through their messages, and I watched twenty years of sisterhood and nine years of marriage come apart on a small glass screen: the pet names, the logistics, the careful coordination around my shift calendar, the whole administrative machinery of two people betraying me on a schedule.

It was worse than I’d imagined and also, somehow, smaller — the great tragedy of my life reduced to the banal texting of two people arranging when to meet.