“You don’t want to lie to me? What do you think you’ve been doing for the past year? Our whole family—our whole life—is a lie.”

Her voice was thin and shrill, a voice she didn’t recognize.

Scenes from their marriage began to tug at her memory. The restaurant receipts she had thought unlikely venues for client dinners. The weekends he’d ventured to the office when he could have worked from home. The last-minute trips to film sets that had never been necessary before. All those nights—dozens of them—when he’d been working late and then showered as soon as he’d returned, saying he needed to wash the day off his skin. He had covered the tracks of his infidelity with little white lies he had known she was too busy to question, and she had walked behind him, blindly smothering the evidence.

“That’s not true, Lil. Of course it isn’t. I didn’t plan for this to happen, it just did. Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.”

His voice was imploring, as though he had the right to ask anything of her.

“You don’t want this to be hard? You think this should be easy? You detonate our lives and you think we’re all going to walk away unscathed? That’s not how this works, Daniel.” She had wanted her voice to remain calm and controlled but anger rumbled beneath it like distant thunder. “Who is she?”

Daniel groaned and a ripple of impatience skimmed across the surface of Lily’s fury.

“Who is she, Daniel? I want to know.” She sounded convincing, no trace of the fear of his answer.

“She’s a lawyer, from a different firm. We met at a conference.”

So factual, so unsentimental. Lily almost felt like punching him.

“What’s she doing here? Is that why you haven’t come home at all? Has she been coming here instead? For God’s sake, Daniel, you haven’t seen our daughter except on Skype in over four months and for what? So you can have your mistress come and visit you instead?”

An almost imperceptible twitch flickered at the corner of Daniel’s left eye. Lily had seen it countless times over the year: an unmistakable tell. “What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”

He raised his head, catching her gaze before evading it, like a moth fluttering too close to a flame. “She lives here. Amy. She lives in New York. She’s American.”

The words took a few seconds to attach themselves to meaning. “You moved here for her? I don’t believe I’m hearing this. I can’t believe you could be so duplicitous, so devious. You moved your career—your life—here for her?” A sharp acidity bubbled in the back of Lily’s throat. So many lies, so much deceit. And then she remembered.

Sweetheart, could you give us a few minutes? The way he’d said it, the way he’d directed her back upstairs.

“You’re living with her, aren’t you? You’re actually bloody living together. I’m right, aren’t I?”

Daniel dropped his eyes to the ground and Lily heard the deafening slam of one door closing and the palpable silence where another failed to open.