Grinning, Frazer shook her head. “No, you won’t. I burnt it last year.”

“Oh, please, I’ll just write a fake one. I pretty much know it by heart anyway.” Jemma cleared her throat as if about to give a world-changing speech, but when she spoke, it was with her best mimicking voice. “Today I watched a movie with Drew Barrymore—I think I’m supposed to notice the guy, but all I could think about was her—”

A pillow in the face cut Jemma off. She pulled it down against her stomach, looking smug, beer secure in her other hand.

“That wasn’t at all how it went.” The tone in Frazer’s voice was too high-pitched, even to her.

“Sure, Sis.”

“And besides, it was Jodie Foster, not Drew Barrymore.”

“Same, same.”

“It is not the same.”

Jemma lay back down, her bottle resting on her stomach. “Whatever. Something’s up with you.”

“It’s really not.”

“Sure, Sis.”

This was past irritating and rounding to kick-her-out-of-the-house zone.

“How’s your lecturer?” Frazer asked.

Frazer ducked the pillow before it hit her in the face.

* * *

The words exploded, like a carbonated drink overshaken. For Cora, the morning had ticked by agonisingly slowly, the plan to say her piece when he couldn’t argue, minutes before he left the house to make his plane.

If there was something Alec couldn’t abide more than conversing with his wife, it was being late.

Afterwards, the words floated through the air like mist, impossible to pull back and ram down her throat. Alec stared at her, his face pale. The urge to make a retraction, to shake her head, to make the look leave his face reared, large and ugly.

“You what?” His voice was tight.

“I want to separate.”

He blinked rapidly. His fist tightened around the handle of his carry-on suitcase. The suit he wore, ironed perfectly, sat so well on him that she felt a tug, low in her stomach. In that moment, he looked like he did the night they had graduated. When she’d straightened his tie and he’d kissed her, excitement strong on his tongue as his career lay out before him. Had it been happening even then? The suffocation, the feeling of being squeezed into a box?

“You don’t mean it, Cora.”

But she did. She meant every word.

The way her heart was beating made it difficult to hear herself think. She licked her lips. Next to her, on the mantelpiece, their wedding photos were lined up, a marching formation to nowhere.

“I do.”

“You can’t do this to me.” The muscles in his jaw clenched.

But she had to. Before it got worse.

There was no knowing where they were going, but they’d beaten their marriage to death for too long. They’d tried. But over the years, she’d followed him, not noticing how he chipped away at her, how the steps demanded she left things behind so she could keep up. When had she started to do what he wanted, when he wanted, to pacify him? When she stumbled, when had he stopped helping her up instead of turning a frustrated glare at her, eventually not noticing at all? When had he stopped wanting to ask her about her day? And had he ever really asked?