It was love, or the wreckage of love, doing the thing love does, which is to keep believing in a person past the point where the evidence allows.

What finally ended it was not the affair at all.

It was the discovery of the medical-evaluation scheme — the moment I understood that while I was busy hoping he would come back to himself, he was busy planning to have me declared insane.

You can hope a cheating husband will change.

You cannot hope your way out of a man who is building a legal case for your madness.

That discovery was the one that made me finally pick up the phone and call Barnabas, and once I called him, the nine months of grieving became six weeks of the coldest, most precise work I have ever done.