But am I? He doesn’t show the least bit of interest in me anymore, aside from making sure I don’t talk to anyone outside his approved sphere or to neg me. He’s never shown the slightest interest in Penelope so what else is new there. God, I feel like he’s taken everything from me at this point, like I’m this floating flesh sac with no personality, nothing to lose or gain. When I gave up everything to be with him, including the best friend I’ve ever had, I thought I was giving it all up for something real. But now I know he was never any more real than anything else in this fabricated city. I wish he’d disappear. Even his presence makes me inescapably annoyed, all those weird grunts he makes when he sleeps, the sniffle of his nose. I can’t stand any of it. He’s absolutely insufferable.

And on and on and on it went, picking him apart until he was slaughtered and disemboweled on a table, a pig with its intestines hanging open like an old-fashioned telephone cord. Oddly, as he’d sat there reading, he hadn’t felt a thing. He’d been strangely detached from all of it, as if these slanderous phrases were about another husband in another marriage, one who had nothing to do with him.

It got worse, though.

I did it. I reached out to Peri. Or I tried to, at least. I think she’s changed her number. I’m not sure what came over me. I just feel so...lonely? I know who she is, what she did, but I miss her. No one has ever made me feel the way I felt when I was with her. Sometimes I don’t think I’ve really felt anything in ages.

That was what did it, the ultimate betrayal. That was what made him want to tear his wife to pieces, to gnaw at her soul until she disintegrated.

Ten years ago Tom and Peri had reveled in doing depraved, violent things to other women during sex. It had started early on. About six months into their relationship, they’d started to bring in other women, random girls they met at bars. But soon those easy conquests became stale, vanilla.

Then one day, when the couple was alone, Peri brought a pair of tiny, nonthreatening scissors into bed. “Carve me, baby.” He had laughed, taken the scissors from her, so small that they looked like they were from a child’s toy chest, and cut the air with them.

“I’m serious,” she said, reaching for them with a sinewy arm. “Prick me.” But he laughed at her, dangling them from his pinky, the blades so minuscule next to his fingers.