Page 57 of Rich Little Liars

‘What things?’

‘The way she looked at you. The way she kept turning up at the house. The way she was always here, always invading our lives.’

Daniel nodded slowly, as if considering this. ‘And you never thought… I mean, it didn’t occur to you that you might be misreading the situation?’

‘Misreading?’ I stared at him. ‘Daniel, I caught you in bed with her.’

‘We were kissing. That’s all. You walked in before anything actually happened.’

‘Before anything…’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘You were half-undressed. She was in her bra. In our bed.’

‘I know. And that was wrong. I’m not saying it wasn’t.’ He leaned forward, his expression earnest. ‘But nothing actually happened, Kelly. You stopped it before it went anywhere. And I think that matters. I think that should count for something.’

‘Count for something? You were about to have sex with another woman!’

‘About to. But I didn’t. We didn’t.’ His voice remained calm. Reasonable. Like he was explaining something obvious to a child. ‘And I’ve been thinking about this, really thinking, and I wonder if you’re blowing this out of proportion because of all the suspicions you’d already built up about Roxanne. You convinced yourself she was some kind of predator, and now you’re seeing what happened through that lens.’

The logic was dizzying. I felt myself grasping for solid ground that kept shifting beneath my feet.

‘I saw what I saw,’ I said quietly.

‘You saw a kiss. A moment of weakness that I immediately regretted. And yes, we were on the bed, and yes, things might have escalated if you hadn’t come home. But they didn’t escalate. That’s the point.’ Daniel shook his head. ‘I’m not excusing my behaviour. But there’s a difference between a terrible mistake that got interrupted and an actual affair. And the way you’ve been acting, it’s like you caught us in the middle of… I don’t know. Something much worse than what it was.’

‘Something much worse,’ I repeated flatly. ‘How many times do I have to repeat this before the severity registers with you: you had another woman in our bed.’

‘And I’m sorry. I’ve said I’m sorry a hundred times. But you’ve been treating me like a monster when what I am is a man who made a stupid, impulsive mistake in a moment of weakness. A mistake that never even got completed because you walked in.’

I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it again. Because some tiny, treacherous part of me was listening. Nothing had actually happened. Technically. The sex I’d imagined, the full betrayal I’d been nursing for days – it existed only in my imagination of what would have occurred if I’d arrived ten minutes later.

‘Kelly.’ Daniel reached out and took my hand. ‘I love you. I want us to work. But for that to happen, you need to consider the possibility that you’ve catastrophised this into something bigger than it was. You were already paranoid about Roxanne – you’d been suspicious of her for weeks before any of this happened. And I wonder if that paranoia is colouring how you’re processing what you actually saw.’

‘Excuse me? This is far from just paranoia. You were two seconds from having sex with her, Daniel! Pouring our marriage down the drain for a quick⁠—’

‘Are you sure? Because from where I’m sitting, you spent weeks treating an innocent woman like a threat. Watching her every move. Analysing her every word. Convincing yourself she was plotting something when she was just being friendly.’

‘And it turns out I was right the whole time! Because⁠—’

He squeezed my hand gently. ‘And then when you caught us in a moment of weakness – a moment I’m deeply ashamed of, don’t get me wrong – you immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion. An affair. A conspiracy. An ongoing seduction.’

‘That’s not⁠—’

‘Come on. You texted her telling her you’d make her regret ever knocking on our door. That’s not a proportionate response to a kiss, Kelly. That’s something else. That’s… that worries me.’

I felt the ground shifting again. My threat to Roxanne, which had felt righteous at the time, now sounded unhinged when he said it back to me. Disproportionate. Paranoid.

‘She was trying to take you from me,’ I said, but my voice sounded uncertain.

‘Or was she a lonely woman who developed feelings she shouldn’t have, in a situation that got out of hand?’ Daniel’s thumb stroked across my knuckles. ‘I think you created a villain because you needed someone to blame. For the distance between us. For all the problems we’ve been having. It was easier to point at Roxanne and say “she’s the enemy” than to look at us. At what we’ve become.’

The words landed somewhere deep. Because he wasn’t entirely wrong. I had been looking for someone to blame. Had been cataloguing Roxanne’s transgressions from the moment she arrived, searching for proof that my marriage was being attacked from the outside rather than crumbling from within.

‘I don’t know what to think any more,’ I admitted.

‘That’s okay. We’ll figure it out together.’ Daniel squeezed my hand. ‘But I need you to try. To really try to see things from a different perspective. Can you do that? For us?’

He was gaslighting me in the worst possible way, but I nodded anyway. Because what else could I do? My husband was sitting here offering reconciliation, offering an explanation that made me the unreasonable one, and I was too exhausted to fight any more.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll try.’