Chapter 1

The day I sold my cottage to build a life with Blaine, I came home early and found the woman who had destroyed my first marriage drinking wine with my second husband.

Nadine sat at our dining table with her shoes off and one leg folded beneath her. Blaine was beside her, his hand resting over hers.

They separated when they saw me.

The folder from the closing was still under my arm. A cardboard box filled with the last of my belongings sat at my feet.

"I thought you wouldn't be back until seven," Blaine said.

"Clearly."

Nadine reached for her shoes. A brass key lay beside her phone.

I stared at it. "Is that a key to this house?"

Neither of them answered.

"Blaine?"

He rose from the table. "We need to talk."

"How long?"

Nadine looked at him, waiting for him to decide how much truth I deserved.

"A few months," he said.

This morning, he had kissed me before I left for the closing. He had called the cottage the last piece of my old life and promised that selling it would let us begin properly.

The proceeds were now in the joint account he had insisted we open.

"You let me sell my home knowing you were sleeping with her."

"The sale has nothing to do with Nadine."

"You waited until I had nowhere of my own before you told me."

His mouth tightened. "I wanted you settled before we had this conversation."

Settled. As if he'd done me a kindness.

Nadine picked up the key with her phone.

"Why does she have that?" I asked.

"Because I gave it to her," Blaine said. "She comes here sometimes."

"When I'm not home."

"That was easier for everyone."

The night my first marriage ended, I opened my bedroom door and found Nadine buttoning Eric's shirt.

Eric told our friends I was unstable. Nadine said I had mistaken one bad decision for an affair.

Blaine had been the only person who didn't ask me to prove what I'd seen.

He packed my clothes when I couldn't enter that bedroom again. He sat outside my therapist's office through every appointment.

When Eric appeared at my cottage one night, shouting and pounding on the door, Blaine stayed until morning.

"She'll never get close enough to hurt you again," he'd told me.

I had believed him so completely that I married him.

Now he stood between us while Nadine slipped his key into her purse.

"I'll call you later," she told him.

She walked past me without a word and closed the door behind her.

I waited until her car pulled away. "Of all the women in this city, you chose her."

"This wasn't something I planned."

"Giving her a key required planning. So did waiting until today."

He exhaled as though I were exhausting him. "I knew you'd react like this."

"How did you expect me to react?"

"Like an adult. Nothing has to change between us."

I looked at him. "You want me to remain your wife while she lets herself into our house?"

"I want you to remember what your life was like before me."

The man who had once used that memory to comfort me was using it now to keep me still.

I picked up the box and reached for the front door.

"Corinne," he said, "you won't last one night out there before the panic starts."

I turned back.

He nodded toward the closing folder in my hand.

"Where exactly would you go? You sold the only place that was yours this morning."