Yet crossing that terrazzo floor toward the man who had married me twenty-four hours earlier, I felt no savor, only a great and final clarity, as if a fog I’d been living inside for two years had lifted all at once and left the room very sharp and very quiet.

I was not wearing the synthetic dress or the borrowed meekness anymore.

I wore a charcoal suit cut precisely to me, an emerald-cut diamond on my hand, and the particular calm of a person who no longer has anything to prove and never really did.

Rosario followed with a briefcase; two security officers came in behind him.

Imelda’s cup slipped out of her fingers and cracked against the glass, coffee spreading across the table toward her son’s tablet.

Chapter 13 — How Did You—