2018/62: The Space Between -- Dete Meserve

With each passing day, I’d become invisible to him. Like the Trojan asteroid, I was dancing in his orbit day after day, but was completely unnoticed by him. [loc. 416]

Astronomer Sarah Mayfield is devoted to her work: she's just given a presentation on the discovery of a Trojan asteroid, 'hiding undetected in Earth's orbit for thousands [sic] of years'. But when she returns to the family home, her husband Ben is missing, there's a Glock in the bedside table, and her account has just been credited with a million dollars. Their son Zack has been behaving badly, hence the installation of a video home-security system (which has been wiped clean), but he doesn't seem to know anything about his father's absence.

It's beginning to look as though Ben had a secret life. But Sarah is not wholly above-board either: with each new clue about Ben, she reveals one of her own secrets, such as the attraction she feels for co-worker Aaron, or the ultimatum she gave Ben before departing for the presentation. And when the clues seem to indicate that Ben's secrets are dangerous ones, Sarah lies to everyone in order to ensure that, whatever the truth, she'll be the first to know. Has she been wrong about Ben all these years?

This was a Kindle Unlimited book that I picked on a whim, because of the astronomical angle. Pleasingly, Sarah's career does play a part in the plot, and is also an excellent source of metaphors: "some things hide in plain sight ... We often can’t see or observe them because we’re blinded by the light of other objects." [loc. 1263] Searching for the truth in 'the space in between', Sarah ends up piecing together an unexpected and suspenseful story. There's a mention of A Wrinkle in Time (I think), considerable resistance to hackneyed assumptions about career women, and some splendid scenery. A well-paced novel, though I didn't engage with the characters.