The words didn’t land all at once. They moved through her slowly, like cold water finding its way down the back of a shirt.
She laughed once from sheer disbelief. “What are you talking about?”
He took in the room as if gathering evidence against her. The drying rack by the window. The stack of folded towels. The cookbook on the coffee table with a bookmark tucked into a soup recipe. The house dress she still wore because she had cleaned all afternoon and changed into something soft while dinner cooked. Everything ordinary and domestic that had once been called care and was now, apparently, being reclassified as failure.
“Look at you,” he said. “You smell like cooking. You look like somebody’s aunt. You are an embarrassment to take anywhere that matters.”
Rhea’s hand moved automatically to her own throat, as if she might find proof there that she still existed in the same world as this sentence.
Mark continued, and now his voice sharpened because saying cruel things becomes easier once you hear yourself survive the first one. “Angelica is the woman who suits me. She belongs in the places I’m going. She understands the life I want.”
Angelica.
Of course.
The name had been in their apartment for months before it was ever said aloud in that doorway. It came home on his shirts in traces of perfume that were not hers. It arrived in the sudden need for new suits, new watches, new restaurants she was never invited to. It lived in his changed habits, in his disdain for the meals he once praised, in the way he had started looking at her as if she were not a wife but a draft version of the life he intended to revise.
Rhea stood slowly. “You’re talking about your boss’s friend?”
“She’s not just a friend.”
