Lyra was the first of them.
Lyra was married to Dorian’s younger brother, Rhys — a good man, a structural engineer who supervised overnight bridge work along the interstate and was gone for days at a stretch, which Odette had thought little of at the time and understood now as the whole architecture of the thing.
Rhys’s absence was not incidental.
It was the opening the entire affair was built around.
And in the same months that Dorian had gone cold, Lyra had bloomed — new designer clothes, jewelry that caught the light at Sunday dinners, handbags that an engineer’s wife could not have bought on any honest math.
Odette had noticed, the way you notice a detail before you understand it, and had told herself a dozen soft lies to explain it away.
Then there were the smaller things, the ones that only cohere in retrospect.
The way a conversation between Dorian and Lyra would die the instant Odette entered the kitchen.
The hand that rested a half-second too long on a shoulder.
The glances that crossed the dinner table and pretended not to.