It was raining when she stood under the awning of the building just a few yards from where her car was parked. Winnie stood huddled there, her eyes looking at the bruised color of the sky and not really seeing it. Where would she go if she got in and drove right now? She didn’t know, so instead of walking to her car she flipped the hood up on her jacket and began walking along the sidewalk, dodging a couple of guys who had their eyes on their phones. The rain was more of a mist, and it swept into her face with an affection only Seattle rain offered.

If they fought it would get ugly, because that’s how people with secrets stepped into the ring. If she told Nigel she knew he’d searched for Lisa Sharpe online he would get accusatory, make her feel awful for snooping and then thinking the worst of him. And maybe he’d be right, or maybe he’d be gaslighting her; she was fairly certain she did her fair share of gaslighting herself. But Nigel wasn’t like Winnie; he wasn’t trying to punish himself for his role in her mistake. No, if he was searching for information it was to benefit himself. You couldn’t live with someone for years on end without knowing their patterns; good or bad you learned them.

Winnie licked the water off her lips. She wasn’t aware of where she was walking, or how fast; she was only vaguely aware of the people she passed and how they stared at her. It must be my makeup, she thought. The rain that was kissing her face was probably making her mascara run. A voice in the back of her mind was telling her that she was deciding how people were seeing her instead of facing the truth about how she actually looked; the voice sounded suspiciously like the therapist she’d seen for three years, the man’s voice more distinct in her mind than her dead father’s. He’d ended up losing his license, after which Winnie quit therapy indefinitely to become a full-time control freak mom.