He thought her books were trite, though he’d never said that. He’d never had to. It was in the way he smiled at her over the breakfast table, all indulgent, condescending benevolence, when she told him she was going into her office to work for the morning, and to please not interrupt unless he was bleeding or otherwise dying. She said it jokingly, but was dead serious. He had the most annoying ability to step inside her space at the most inopportune times. And lo, one hour later, just as she would be hitting her stride (the first thirty minutes being spent cruising the social networks, of course) here he would come, whistling.

“Ready for a break, darling? I thought we could have an early lunch.”

“I have an article due for the New Yorker, would you mind giving it a polish?”

“This chapter is giving me fits, could you help?”

And she’d always acquiesce, because that’s what good wives did. She fed and watered and laid herself down for sex at all hours and wrote and rewrote and polished his words till they shone, so he would stay happy, stay with her, and could continue getting the accolades that kept them in the heavily renovated Franklin Victorian McMansion they lived in, kept the adulation of the literati high.

Back in the flat, Sutton broke off a piece of the crusty bread, spread it with the soft, creamy cheese. Stared out her window at the Tour, smelled the smoke of a nearby fireplace. She was no longer a good wife. She no longer belonged to him. It was such a relief.

How had they arrived at this point, she and Ethan, as strangers again? Once, they were inseparable. They were horizontal as often as they were vertical. They had fun, laughs, joy, desires. Now, desire for Ethan was as foreign to her as this food she was buying, this city she had fled to. But that was why she came, to find a new life among the marble and grass and flowers. To escape. To start again. To start over. For herself.

Somehow, some way, she was going to eradicate the past half decade of her life.

And so she worked. And she ate again. And then she took a walk. Because that’s what writers living in Paris did.