I used to love our house, the patio adorned with potted plants and a green metal table and chairs like in a quaint French bistro, the perfect spot to drink wine in the evening and watch the floodlights come on in the grounds of the old castle. A castle I had never even realized existed—despite having lived in the area for years—until Chris took me there for a date. We ate a picnic and drank wine that came in squat plastic glasses with foil lids. It reminded me of the fluorescent drink cups Leah and I used to have on the beach when we were kids, bright green or luminous orange and so full of sugar it would take just seconds before the wasps were on us. The wine was warm and foul, but the castle was magical. We went there again on our first anniversary, this time with a better quality of “beverage,” and talked for hours and hours as the air turned frigid around us. On our second anniversary it was raining, but we still walked around the grounds. He apologized over and over about the weather, seeming so desperate for me to forgive him for the day being less than perfect. Such a perfectly choreographed remorse for something I could hardly blame on him. I didn’t know at the time that it was the day after he first fucked my twin. Now the castle is tainted, and I will never be able to go there again.

The kitchen is tiny, all the appliances squished together and no room for anything. I have never been a great cook, so it didn’t matter, when we first bought the house at least. But now, as I stand in my kitchen with arms outstretched so my fingertips graze the walls on either side, I am struck by envy. Leah’s kitchen is huge and white and sparse. Not sparse in a bad way, but because there is so much cupboard space everything can be tucked away neatly out of sight. Not in my kitchen, where cookbooks jostle with skillets and the knives live on a metallic strip on the wall so they don’t take up one of the drawers. Squeezed into the corner is a little table and two chairs. Was it only the weekend before last when Chris made me pancakes and we sat at that very table to eat them as I wondered if he was trying to poison me?

My best friend Hannah texts me. A slightly passive-aggressive message berating me for not responding to her text earlier in the week. It is not the first time I have left her hanging. I dig around in the fridge to find a half-drunk bottle of Sauvignon Blanc—probably the same one I was drinking the night before I… well, we all know what I did—and I slop some in a glass before I call her. Walking to the living room on speakerphone, I leaf through the handfuls of letters from the week: bill, bill, junk mail, bill, some newsletter from my accounting body, bill, junk mail, request for support from my alma mater. Nothing to write home about. I smile; that was what Tom said last night when I grilled him more about his job.