There is always
a cost to
wanting more.

Sloane Hale runs a company in Seattle and keeps one man on her phone at all times. Cal is the stepfather who raised her, an ex-Marine who has stood at the edge of his own life for eight months.

Then a couple she does business with invites her to dinner, and the price they put on her company’s future is Sloane, upstairs, with the two of them.

She can keep that night from anyone except Cal, who spent twenty years as an interrogator.

The dining car of the Orient Express is full the night it leaves Paris, so the conductor seats Hannah at Josh’s table.

She is thirty-two, a marine scientist, and before dinner is over she tells him she has rules. He is twenty-three, and he promises to obey them.

By Vienna there is a code between them. But on the first night he lied to her about his family, and the truth is something he has never told anyone.

Hannah and Josh board Aurelia in New Zealand for a year at sea, the Antarctic summer and then the Arctic one, and they board together or not at all.

Elliot Brandt wants them at his table. He has an offer for each of them, and he makes both before he asks for anything.

Then he tells them what he wants. And somewhere among the hundred crew is a man Hannah had hoped never to see again.

Tess and Joel have been married for eleven years, and they’ve never doubted each other. For four Fridays they go to a club and come home untouched.

On the fifth, a man called Grant puts his hand in the small of Tess’s back, and her husband watches.

Joel says he wasn’t humiliated. Tess doesn’t believe him. Everyone at the club has a word for a man like her husband, and she means to make sure nobody ever says it.

But Joel knows exactly what he wants, and he’s waiting for her to work it out.