Her husband called her unstable and tried to take everything—then she opened her gray coat in court and revealed the decorated General he had spent years pretending she wasn’t.

Chapter 2

The photographs went back eighteen months.

That was the first thing I understood, standing in my own kitchen with my husband’s phone growing warm in my hand, the rain still drumming against the glass like an audience that refused to leave. Eighteen months of dinners in cities I had never visited, of hotel rooms with identical white duvets, of Julian’s face tilted toward Camille’s in a dozen selfies he had been careless enough to let the cloud back up.

Eighteen months of me somewhere else. Deployments had ended three years ago, but the work had not — the consultancies, the foundation boards, the speaking engagements that took me away for long stretches and left Julian alone in this house with my friend.

I did not scroll further. I did not need to. I locked the phone, placed it back on the counter exactly where it had been, and walked upstairs on legs I could not feel.