Chapter 2
This is why I love you. You're so understanding.
I kept smiling until he left the room.
Then my hand started shaking around the knife, and I put it down on the cutting board, and I stood in the kitchen of the house I had spent eight years making warm and I looked at the clean counters and the half-cut vegetables and I thought about Vanessa wearing white to my wedding and calling it champagne, and I thought about the text messages, and I thought about the lipstick, and I thought about the perfume, and I called my best friend Amy and said he invited Vanessa to dinner and Amy said tell me you said no and I said I said yes and Amy said Laura and I said I'm tired and I was.
I was tired of being the wife who absorbed things. I was tired of being the architecture of his respectability, the understanding wife who made his life comfortable enough that he could maintain what he was maintaining on the side without it costing him anything. I told Amy I was going to make dinner perfect. She asked what that meant. I told her it meant exactly what it sounded like.
That night Trevor came to bed humming. He scrolled under the blanket with that small private smile he only wore for her, and when he turned toward me with more warmth than he'd shown in months I said I had a headache and turned away, and in the dark I picked up my phone and opened the contact I had been sitting with for two months.
Bradley Morrison.
I had met him at a charity event for work in October. He was a corporate attorney, the kind of man who was put together without being stiff, and we had talked for twenty minutes about a marketing project before he showed me a photograph on his phone. I'm the luckiest man alive, he had said. The woman in the photograph was dark-haired, laughing, standing in front of what looked like a vineyard. She was beautiful. I had looked at the photograph and smiled and said she seems wonderful and gone home and spent three days deciding what to do with the information.
The woman in the photograph was Vanessa.
Trevor's Vanessa. The engaged woman who still texted my husband good morning. The woman whose name lit up his phone at midnight while he was married to me.
May you like
I had sat with that knowledge for two months. I had not confronted Trevor with it, because confrontation was not the shape I wanted this to take. I had not called Bradley, because the moment wasn't ready. I had simply let it sit in the back of my mind like a door I knew was there, waiting until someone gave me a reason to open it.
Trevor gave me the reason on a Tuesday afternoon in December when he stood in my kitchen smiling at his phone and told me his ex was coming to New Year's Eve dinner and he thought it would be nice.
