I spent the better part of the morning moving with the stiff, unnatural posture of a woman trying to walk away from a car crash she secretly enjoyed. Alexander had left the master suite, our shared suite, shortly after the sun-drenched coffee on the terrace, retreating to his home office to deal with the inevitable fallout of the Julien/Diana blackmail situation.

I used the time to create distance. I showered in the secondary bathroom (a ridiculous sentence, even in my head—a secondary ...