I bought seat 7C on the flight my husband secretly booked with his mistress—then the bank account opened in my name revealed he wasn’t just planning to leave me, he was framing me to lose everything

Chapter 2

Two weeks earlier, on a Tuesday that had begun like any other, my life had broken in the bright light of our kitchen.

I had been standing at the counter peeling an orange for Maya, the morning radio murmuring about traffic, when I noticed the tablet screen glowing at the edge of the counter where Ethan had left it after breakfast. He was careless like that — not in his affairs, never in those, but in the small domestic seams where a web of lies meets a real life. I reached for it with one hand, planning to close his email window the way I had a thousand times before, and my fingers stopped over the blue-and-white confirmation of a flight I had not been invited on.

Miami. Two passengers. Seats 7A and 7B. Friday morning. Outbound on Delta, returning Sunday.