The call came at 7:03 a.m. on a Tuesday, piercing the quiet hum of my Manhattan kitchen. It was my sister, Kayle, a senior captain for United Airlines. She never called before a flight unless it was an emergency.

“I need to ask you something strange,” her voice crackled through the phone, breathless and tight. “Your husband… is he home right now?”

I frowned, balancing my coffee mug in one hand while I wiped down the granite countertop with the other. “Yes,” I said slowly, glancing toward the living room. Through the open archway, I could see the back of his head, the familiar slope of his shoulders as he sat in his leather armchair, reading the Financial Times. “He’s sitting in the living room. Why?”

The silence that followed was heavy, static-filled, and terrified. Then Kayle whispered the words that would shatter my reality into irreparable shards.

“That can’t be true, Ava. Because I am watching him board my flight to Paris right now. He’s holding hands with another woman.”

A cold numbness started at the base of my spine and radiated outward. “Kayle, that’s impossible. He’s right there. I can see him.”

“I’m telling you, it’s Aiden,” she insisted, her voice dropping lower. “He’s in seat 3B. The woman is young, blonde. They look… intimate. Ava, I’ve known him for ten years. I know how he walks. I know the scar above his left eyebrow. It is him.”

Behind me, the floorboards creaked.

“Who’s calling so early?”

The voice was rich, British, and wrapped in the drowsy warmth of morning. I turned around. Aiden stood in the doorway, his gray cashmere sweater sleeves pushed up to his elbows, holding his empty mug. He smiled—that crooked, self-deprecating half-smile that had charmed me seven years ago at a charity gala.

“Just Kayle,” I managed to say, my voice sounding hollow, as if coming from underwater. “Pre-flight check. She wanted to know if we received the package she sent.”

“Ah. Tell her safe travels.” He walked past me to the coffee maker, moving with the easy, proprietary grace of a man in his own home. He poured a refill, added a splash of oat milk—just how he liked it—and kissed the top of my head. “I’ll be in the study. Market opening in ten minutes.”

I stood frozen, gripping the phone until my knuckles turned white. My husband was standing five feet away from me. My husband was also apparently buckling his seatbelt at JFK, bound for Europe with a mistress.

Logic dictated that one of these realities was a hallucination. But I wasn’t a woman prone to flights of fancy. I was a forensic accountant. For twenty years, I had made a career out of finding the truth buried in mountains of lies. I knew that numbers didn’t lie, but people did.

“Kayle,” I whispered into the phone, turning my back to the man in the kitchen. “Send me a photo. Now.”

Three minutes later, my phone buzzed.

I locked myself in the bathroom and opened the image. It was taken from the cockpit door, angled down into the first-class cabin. The resolution was sharp. There, in seat 3B, sat a man in a navy Tom Ford suit. He was turned in profile, laughing at something the blonde woman next to him had said.

I zoomed in. The jawline. The slight bump on the bridge of his nose. The way he held his champagne flute, pinky finger slightly extended. It was Aiden.

But the man in the other room was also Aiden. I had just watched him type his password into his laptop. I had smelled his cologne—Santal 33.

I looked at the mirror. My reflection was pale, my green eyes wide with panic. I needed to stabilize. Panic was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I was a hunter of discrepancies, and I had just stumbled upon the biggest variance of my life.

I walked out of the bathroom and went straight to the study. “Aiden” was on a call, speaking in rapid-fire financial jargon.

“The merger in Tokyo is contingent on the Q3 reports,” he was saying, spinning a pen between his fingers. He looked up, saw me, and winked.

I forced a smile. “I’m going to run some errands. Do you need anything?”

“Just you, darling,” he said. The affection in his voice made my stomach churn. “Actually, could you pick up my dry cleaning? The blue suit?”

“Of course.”

I left the apartment, my heart hammering against my ribs like a trapped bird. As soon as I hit the sidewalk, I hailed a cab.

“Where to, lady?”

“Midtown,” I said. “And hurry.”

I wasn’t going to the dry cleaners. I was going to see Sophia Chen. Sophia was my college roommate turned private intelligence contractor. She specialized in “marital reconnaissance,” a polite term for digging up dirt on wealthy, cheating spouses.

When I arrived at her loft, she took one look at my face and poured two fingers of whiskey. “Sit down. Talk.”

I showed her the photo. I explained the man in my apartment. Sophia didn’t blink. She didn’t call me crazy. She simply pulled out her tablet and started typing.

“First, we check the building security,” she said, her fingers flying across the keys. She had contacts everywhere, access to systems that legally shouldn’t be accessible. “Here we go. Lobby feed from last Tuesday.”

We watched the footage. Aiden—or the man pretending to be him—entered the building at 6:47 p.m.

“Stop,” Sophia commanded. She zoomed in on the shadow cast by the lobby chandelier. “Look at the refraction.”

“What?”

“It’s a deep fake overlay on the security feed,” she said, her voice grim. “But it’s glitching. See the shadow? It doesn’t match the angle of the light source. Someone has hacked your building’s system to insert pre-recorded footage of Aiden coming and going to mask the movements of the impostor.”

“That’s… that’s sophisticated,” I stammered. “That costs millions.”

“Exactly,” Sophia looked at me, her dark eyes intense. “Ava, people don’t go to these lengths for a simple affair. This is a corporate-level extraction operation. Who is the man in your apartment?”

“I don’t know. He looks like him. He sounds like him. He knows where we keep the sugar.”

“We need to find the cracks,” Sophia said. “Every performance has a crack. Go back home. Act normal. But watch him. Test him. And for God’s sake, don’t let him know you know.”