My name is Camille Laurent, and until a quiet spring morning in Manhattan, I believed catastrophic betrayals belonged to other people—faces on television interviews, subjects of glossy documentaries, characters in novels filled with elegant sorrow but safely distant from my own meticulously curated life.

I was standing by the bedroom window of our Upper East Side apartment, watching soft sunlight spill across the polished floors, when my phone vibrated against the marble vanity. I smiled automatically, assuming my husband, Alexander Reid, was calling between meetings about something pleasantly mundane.