The morning after my wedding, I found a photograph of my husband with another woman.
She was at least sixty.
That should have made me feel better.
It didn’t.
Because on the back of the Polaroid, in blue ink, someone had written:
Adrian — thank you for keeping your promise. Claire still can’t know I’m back in Bellmere. Not yet.
I read it three times.
Then a fourth.
My new husband was asleep ten feet away.
Adrian Cole lay buried beneath the white duvet in our suite at the Evermere Grand Hotel, one arm thrown over my side of the bed as though his body was already looking for me.
Twenty-four hours earlier, I had stood across from him under strings of lights in the hotel garden and promised to trust him with the rest of my life.
Now I was standing beside his discarded tuxedo with a photograph in one hand and a storage-company receipt in the other.
