The movie had not even started yet.
Advertisements flashed across the giant screen while orchestral music thundered through expensive surround sound speakers, illuminating the theater intermittently with bursts of blue and gold light. Teenagers laughed somewhere near the back row, couples whispered softly beneath velvet shadows, and a fictional superhero promised eternal loyalty during an overly dramatic trailer that almost made Emma laugh bitterly.
Because three rows ahead of her sat billionaire real estate developer Grant Whitmore leaning intimately toward a woman wearing a scarlet silk dress while whispering into her ear as though his pregnant wife did not exist.
As though Emma herself had not kissed him goodbye earlier that morning while he claimed he was flying to Boston for an emergency board meeting.
The other woman smiled slowly.
Not nervously.
Not guiltily.
Confidently.
