Social interaction is vital! Cecilia Grand had underlined.

Did he want something? He didn’t seem to be in a hurry for seeds or pellets or treats. The water container was full. Could he be enjoying the sound of a reading voice? Gwen decided to continue.

“Woe came upon the people,” she said, and set the pages down. She was thinking of the group at Cassie’s.

Woe was what everything was about these days. Perhaps each person in the group was acquainted with a different version. Her woe was her life with Brigg. She had lied about him to the others. They probably thought she was someone who had buried herself for years in a dingy office at Spinney’s, and maybe she had. But she liked the group, the people who were part of it. She just wasn’t entirely comfortable there. Absolutely no one had mentioned the way grief could pursue: a scythe whipping through the air, closing in on the wounded. Was she the only one? She would not be able to explain this to the others. Her wounds. And maybe what was in pursuit was not grief at all.

She plunked down in the chair and began to cry.

Woe indeed.

She had occasionally dared to talk back, but only when Brigg pushed too far. From the time they were first married, he had doled out household expense money as if she were the hired help. He didn’t want her to work, so she quit her job before their wedding—she’d been working as an accountant for a car dealer in town, her first job after university. Brigg insisted that he needed her at home. He wanted her to run the house and raise the children they both hoped to have. But she was quick to learn about his stinginess. He had no realistic idea of the cost of feeding and clothing two adults, paying utility bills, keeping fridge and cupboards full. He announced soon after they married that they wouldn’t have joint bank accounts because he would write cheques for whatever she needed. All this was, at first, said in a good-natured way, a joking sort of way. And part of her had believed him. She wanted to believe that he knew what he was talking about. What did she know? She had never been married before. Maybe that was the way he’d been brought up. The husband controlling the money, the bank accounts.

But then he began to push hard, to bully. When he came home from work in the evening, no matter where she was, she felt his will as it roiled and swelled within the walls of the house. After their sons were born, Brigg told Gwen he would not increase her household allowance because she needed to learn thrift. A few months later, he accused her of stealing bills from his shirt pocket before she put the clothes into the washing machine. Money she hadn’t bothered to return.

There had been nothing in his shirt pocket. She was outraged at the accusation and fought back. But he fought harder, until she began to wonder if the bills had been there after all. Maybe she’d washed them away in the rinse water. But no, that wasn’t possible. Without fail, she checked every pocket on washdays.