I’ve had it with the pretense and the lies and the sham of it all.

Phoebe’s words echoed in Lily’s ears. “Phoebe doesn’t know, does she? There’s no way she could have found out?”

Daniel looked up and frowned. “Of course not. How could she? I’ve been really careful.”

He spoke with such earnest reassurance, as though Lily should find comfort in his vigilance.

“But Phoebe gets it, Lil. Before I left, we talked . . . She could tell things weren’t right.”

He said it as though it were a fact of which they should both be proud: that their seventeen-year-old daughter had seen the writing of their marriage on the wall long before Lily had.

She thought about her conversation with Phoebe earlier, about her fantasy that the three of them might spend the summer together in New York. Humiliation scorched her cheeks at the memory of such a recent delusion.

Lily glanced at Daniel and felt the distance open up between them. She had an urge to walk away, to get a cab to the airport and fly back to London on the next available plane, to hold Phoebe in her arms and begin to rebuild their fragile relationship. But first she needed to hear the rest of Daniel’s story, like a self-harmer slicing a razor blade across raw flesh.

“So what was your plan? When were you going to tell me? Or were you just going to stay here, living your double life indefinitely, hoping I might throw in the towel first?”

They looked at one another directly for the first time and she saw it immediately: not just the sadness but the fear. The tangible fear of a secret yet to be confessed.

“What is it, Daniel? Just tell me. Whatever else there is, just bloody tell me.”

There was a heartbeat of silence in which a thousand permutations spun through Lily’s head. But when Daniel finally spoke—when he finally gave her the missing piece of the puzzle—it was too awful for her even to have imagined it.

“Soon. I was going to tell you soon. I’m . . . We’re . . . Amy’s three months pregnant.”

And with those four short words, Lily heard the decisive sound of her marriage ending.

She stared at the whiteness of her knuckles gripping the castle’s stone wall. She couldn’t look at Daniel, couldn’t bear to see whatever counterfeit expression he’d painted on his face.

He’d been adamant, immovable. She could hear him now, during those endless, cyclical arguments they’d had in the months after her third and final miscarriage.

I don’t want another baby, Lil. To be honest, I never understood this automatic need to have more than one child.

I like our family the way it is.

We tried—three times we tried—because that was what you wanted to do. And it didn’t work out.

Please let’s just be happy with what we have.

Three months pregnant. By the New Year, Daniel would be a father again.