She couldn’t find the datebook, but Ellis’s desktop computer blinked to life when she sort of accidentally nudged the mouse with her elbow. She opened his calendar, which listed “Mtg W CF” for this evening. Clicking on the link, she tried to remember who CF could be. Ellis worked at a mid-level job in one of the private equity subsidiaries of a behemoth financial institution, and so was more frequently in a meeting than not. But this was his personal calendar, not his work calendar.

The link connected to an email. As her eyes flicked over the first few lines, it occurred to her that this was an invasion of her husband’s privacy. Neither she nor Ellis had ever explicitly declared their personal correspondence to be off-limits to one another, but Compton considered her own email account to be private and she supposed Ellis thought the same. One of the earliest lessons they’d tried to teach the children involved a variant of the Golden Rule: whenever you find yourself justifying an action you’re about to take, would you be okay with everyone on the internet watching you do it?

In this case, unequivocally: no. Reading someone else’s email was not cool. But on the other hand—and here came the self-justification—it was a minor infraction. Compton didn’t have anything to hide in her own emails. Ellis had given her no reason to think he did either, and he’d never expressly said she couldn’t read his stuff. His computer wasn’t even password protected, which, come to think of it, was kind of an odd omission for a guy who dealt with sensitive financial information and hostile takeovers. Was it possible that he wanted her to read it? Maybe he was having an affair and this was his passive-aggressive way of getting out.

But no: the email had nothing to do with an affair. It represented a betrayal of an entirely different sort. Compton read through the entire email chain, and then, uncertain if she’d comprehended the implications, prepared to read it again. Before she’d made it more than a couple of words, the door to the apartment banged open and a stampede of small footsteps headed in her direction. She stood so quickly a wave of dizziness nearly felled her.

The children blew past the study, not expecting anyone to be in it. But a moment later Ellis appeared, a sleepy Walter strapped to his chest in a patterned-cloth baby carrier. He rubbed his sparsely bearded chin—he’d been experimenting with beards lately—looking perplexed at finding Compton there.

“Hub City!” Ellis found it amusing to sprinkle little Compton-the-city-in-California references into his husbandly terms of endearment, although Compton went by her maiden name, not out of any particular allegiance to Los Angeles County but because she disliked her real first name. “What are you doing?”