“And if he’d chosen me? Stayed with me, what then? Would you ever have told me, or would you have let me carry on believing my marriage was fine? Would you have sat back and watched me humiliate myself?” Milly stood up and paced to the other side of the room. Her head was throbbing. She couldn’t think straight.

She thought back to the night before, her evening with Brendan. She’d been so hopeful. She’d felt calm and happy, as if she’d taken a real step forward. And now she was being dragged back.

“I don’t know what I would have done.” Nicole was crying now. “It was a horrible position to be in. I didn’t want this to happen to you, and I didn’t want to be part of it. I didn’t know what to do or say.”

She hadn’t imagined, even for a moment, that Nicole had known about the affair, but it explained so much.

“This is why you ghosted me, isn’t it?” She turned to face her friend. “At the time I didn’t understand—I’ve never understood. I couldn’t work out why you would do such an awful thing to me, but this is why.”

Nicole’s eyes filled, and Milly felt as if her heart was being crushed.

“You felt guilty that you’d made him choose, and he chose Avery. You felt too guilty to tell me. Too guilty to talk to me even though I needed your support more than at any other point in my life. You basically abandoned me.”

And that had been the worst thing.

She remembered how lonely she’d felt. How desperate. And how losing her best friend at the same time as losing her husband had been the most bitter blow. Their friendship would have given her strength, and the absence of it had weakened her at a time when she was at her most vulnerable.

Every problem she’d had in life, she’d navigated it with Nicole by her side. But not this time.

“I felt terrible,” Nicole whispered. “And every message and email you sent telling me how devastated you were made me feel worse because I was the cause. You sounded broken. Raw. I was worried that if I confessed my part in it, you’d never forgive me.”

She regretted those emails now. The honesty of them. She’d written them to her closest friend, never suspecting that her friend already knew what was happening or that she wouldn’t reply.

She’d bared her soul. Held nothing back. And all she’d had in return was silence.

And that hurt more than anything.

“It was cruel to ignore me.”