As bestselling novelist Amelie Ferrar knows, an affair with a married person is like a work of fiction: a kind of spy story with its rules and customs, negotiations and compromises, and private rituals. But like any spy story, there will inevitably be a betrayal: something will slip, someone else will find out. Someone may even die.

As Amelie falls deeper into her obsession with the man she loves — and his wife — the line between the fiction she writes and the reality she lives in begins to blur…and the twisted ending to this story is one that not even she could have seen coming.