“Lil, I don’t want this to be any harder on you and Phoebe than it has to be. You can have whatever you want: the house, money, whatever. I just don’t want things to get ugly between us. Do you think we can do that?”

His voice was calm, soothing, the voice someone might use to bring a child out of a tantrum. Except Lily wasn’t having a tantrum. Lily was watching her life implode.

“Lil, please. I know this is hard, and I’m sorry. I never meant for this to happen. I never wanted to hurt you. But I honestly think it’ll be easier on both of us—and Phoebe—if we’re able to keep things civilized. I’ll take all the blame. You can petition me on the grounds of adultery. It only needs to be as difficult as we make it.”

He had it all worked out: a petition for adultery, the quickest route to a clean divorce, leaving him free to marry the redhead before the ink had dried on their divorce decree.

“Part of me will always love you, Lil. Always. But surely you must know things haven’t been great between us these past few years. I don’t know . . . After all those miscarriages . . . I never felt like we’d just lost a baby. I always felt we’d lost a little piece of our marriage too.”

The back of Lily’s throat burned. She thought about her lost babies, those ghostly figures of children who would never take up their rightful place in the family yet never altogether disappear. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner? If you wanted to be with her so much, why didn’t you just leave me?”

Daniel hesitated. “I don’t know. I wasn’t sure, I suppose.”

“You weren’t sure about what?”

“I wasn’t sure about anything. For God’s sake, it’s not a decision I’ve taken lightly. I didn’t know until I got here—until Amy and I were living together—that things were going to work out between us.”

It took a moment for Lily to understand what he meant. “You were hedging your bets? You came out here to test the water? And what were you going to do if it didn’t work out? Come back to me? Pretend nothing had ever happened? Wait until someone else came along? I can’t believe your audacity, Daniel. I can’t believe you could be so selfish, so calculating.”

Lily watched Daniel’s eyes flick up to the left, as they always did when he was in the wrong, the way his lips rolled inward when he was lost for words, the way his fingers rubbed against one another when he was agitated. And in that moment she hated him. She hated him for calling time on their marriage without so much as a warning. Hated him for not having had the courage to leave her until he’d already replaced her. Hated him for the biological injustice that he could start a whole new family. More than anything she hated him for the inequity of it all.