Page 46 of Rich Little Liars

‘Hey!’ The word came out hard. ‘Don’t you dare turn this into my fault. Don’t make yourself the victim of my neglect when you’re clearly the aggressor.’

‘You brought her here. You made friends with her. You invited her into our lives.’

The accusation hit harder than it should have. Because he was right. I had done all those things. Had opened the door to Roxanne that first morning and let her in and never quite managed to close it again.

But that didn’t make this my fault.

‘She played us both,’ I said quietly. ‘Can’t you see that? She showed up out of nowhere with some story about a broken-down car and wormed her way into our lives. Into our marriage. This was always her plan.’

‘That’s ridiculously paranoid.’

‘Oh, come on. Think about it, Daniel. How convenient was her timing? How perfectly did she slot into the gaps between us? How carefully did she position herself as the understanding friend, the supportive listener, the woman who was everything I apparently wasn’t?’

He was quiet for a while. Then: ‘Maybe. Or maybe we were already broken and she just made it obvious.’

The words landed as heavy blows. True in ways I didn’t want to acknowledge.

‘Were we?’ I asked. ‘Were we broken before her?’

‘I don’t know any more. I can’t remember what normal felt like.’

I moved into the room properly then. Sat in the chair by the window – the one Roxanne had draped her jacket over – and looked at my husband, trying to see past the betrayal to whatever had brought us here.

He looked tired. Older than thirty-seven. Lines around his eyes that I hadn’t noticed accumulating. Grey in his hair that seemed to have appeared overnight.

When had I stopped seeing him?

When had he stopped seeing me?

‘What do you want?’ I asked. ‘Do you want her?’

‘No. God, no. It was stupid. I was stupid. I just—’ He stopped, struggling for words. ‘I felt seen. For the first time in months, someone looked at me like I mattered. Like I was interesting. Like I was worth paying attention to.’

‘And I didn’t make you feel that way?’

‘You were busy. We both were. We stopped…’ Another pause. ‘We stopped being us.’

He wasn’t wrong. We had stopped. Had slowly transformed from partners into housemates over the course of a year, maybe longer. So gradual I hadn’t noticed until it was too late. Until the distance between us felt insurmountable.

Until Roxanne had seen the gap and stepped into it.

‘I want you to leave,’ I said.

‘Kelly—’

‘Not permanently. Just for tonight. Go stay somewhere. Let me think. Let us both think about what happens next.’

‘Where am I supposed to go?’

‘I don’t care. Hotel. Friend’s house. Your mother’s. Anywhere but here.’

He stood slowly, reaching for the shirt he’d discarded on the floor. The same floor our marriage had just shattered across. When he was dressed, he looked at me with hope in his eyes.

‘Can we fix this?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you’ll think about it? About whether we can?’