A complete stranger asked me to pretend I had fallen asleep on his shoulder in the middle of a crowded flight,

That was almost everything I still had with me.

I was thirty-one years old, and until that week, I had never seriously imagined leaving Chicago.

My life was there.

Our townhouse was there.

Fiona’s preschool was there.]

The pediatrician who had known her since she was six weeks old was there.

The grocery store where the cashier always gave her a sticker was three blocks from our house.

Even after my marriage began coming apart, some foolish part of me had believed the rest of my life would remain recognizable.

Then David changed the locks.

I discovered it on a Wednesday afternoon.

I had taken Fiona to my sister-in-law’s apartment for a few hours because David said he needed “space to think.”

Those were his exact words.

He had been sleeping in the guest room for almost a month by then.

He had also been coming home later and later, taking calls outside, turning his phone facedown whenever I entered the room, and insisting that the woman from his office whose name kept appearing on his screen was “just part of the team.”

I had spent too much time pretending not to notice things because I was terrified of what noticing them would require me to do.