The photo appeared on a Tuesday, three days after the ring.
I was in the middle of a sentence when Talia called, not a text, a call, which meant it was already too late to manage quietly. I answered and she said, without preamble: "Don't open any news apps. Don't check social media. Just come to mine and I'll explain when you get here."
I opened a news app.
The photo was from college. A party in someone's off-campus apartment, junior year, the kind of party that had cheap wine and too many people and the particular careless joy of being twenty-one and not yet acquainted with consequences. I was laughing in it, genuinely laughing, my head tipped back, a plastic cup in my hand, someone's arm around my shoulder whose face was blurred by motion. It was a photograph of a young woman having a
