“I just don’t understand,” I said. “Okay, so you bumped into Harry, but why did that make you realize that Tom knew about your affair?” Suddenly Ruby looked like a rabbit caught in the headlights and my stomach dropped. I knew she was going to say something really bad. “It doesn’t matter,” I backtracked, but she interrupted me.

“No. You need to know. Harry and I were going to live together.”

“What?”

Her voice was unsteady. “I’m so sorry. It was a fantasy, on my part, at least. I was crazy to think I knew him well enough to do that. I got completely carried away.” There was a long pause, then she said, “I am so sorry I did that to you. I’m ashamed of myself.”

I forced my face to be impassive. I didn’t want her to see the hurt that I felt inside. I said, “When was this?” but I knew. I still made her answer.

“It was June twenty-first,” she whispered.

She didn’t need to say it was the day that I found out I was pregnant. The day Harry came home late, with a huge bouquet of peonies. I’d been such a fool, thinking he’d bought them especially for me. I hadn’t talked to Jane until five o’clock that afternoon and all the florists around here would be shut at that time of day. That bouquet wasn’t for me at all; he must have bought it earlier in the day, before he knew I was pregnant. I felt a surge of anger. He’d bought my favorite flowers for Ruby, to celebrate leaving me.

I looked at Ruby. She was scarlet, wringing her hands, the lot.

I had to ask, but I really didn’t want to know the answer. “How long were you and he together?” I asked. I remembered last Christmas when he was distant, remembered a holiday we’d had in the spring, when he seemed to spend a lot of time on the phone “to the office.” And I remembered myself doing the pick-me dance again and again throughout our marriage, thinking he was a prize. What I deserved. He really wasn’t.

She swallowed hard and I gripped my hands together. “Eighteen months,” she said.

My mind was frantic as I tried to calculate. “Wasn’t that when you started working for him?”

She lowered her eyes, her face a picture of guilt. “Yes. It started almost the moment we met.”

And, just like that, the light went out in my marriage.

CHAPTER 73

Emma

I left Ruby pretty soon after that. I could hardly bear to look at her. My whole body was hurting as though I’d been punched in the gut.

Eighteen months of lies and deceit. It had started the moment they met.