I said his name, but he talked over me, tearing and tearing at the photos, little flecks of destroyed paper drifting down.

“Neither of my daughters would be buying drugs, inviting boys for threesomes. My daughters would never be in that room in the first goddamn place. This was her fucking idea, Bree. Lexie’s. Her idea, her drugs, her choice. She wasn’t raised like my girls have been raised.”

My reaching hands dropped to my sides. Coral was dead, and I was fiercely glad, and yet, as my husband said these things to me, cursed me, spoke to me with such fury that flecks of spittle hit my face, I felt the tug of our old connection. From back when she had owned me. From back when I was hers.

I said quietly, “You’re right. Lexie Pine was raised like me.”

That pushed all his breath out again. He tilted his head back, staring down his nose at me, his nostrils flaring. Then he threw the pictures at me. They were shredded so small that the air caught them. They sprinkled down slowly between us in a fall like snow.

“You are nothing like Lexie Pine,” he said. “You never were.”

In those words I felt the whole world shift. Because he was wrong. I had been. Her own mother had seen it, so much so she changed her ruthless plan to make a deal with me. She’d given Spencer and Adam no choices; she’d shown poor Kelly Wilkerson no mercy. She had bent for me alone, and that bending had let me save my son. His words did more than shift our past. It rewrote history.

What if I had not been in character that day in the High Museum? No theatre-department-borrowed dress, no Betsy-borrowed confidence. Sabreena Kroger, in her thrift-store jeans and faded madras top, hair undone, face bare, skate-walking through the museum in flip-flops, would not have caught his eye. Instead I’d been playing the exact girl he should have married in the first place. Impeccably groomed and expensively clothed, like Maura, but family-oriented, not career-ambitious. I looked like the girl that fit the dreams he used to whisper about back when we started dating, the kind who wanted private-school children and a beach house on Tybee and to live in the old part of Buckhead, two blocks down from his parents.

Or when we started dating, what if my history with men had been more like Betsy’s? Betsy on her rumspringa, pushing boundaries in a way I hadn’t ever needed to try. If I had, would he have kept seeing me, or would I have been a pleasant weekend?