It was when Nigel brought up renting out the apartment downstairs to help with bills that she’d started looking for a job. The thought of some stranger in her house, watching her, terrified Winnie. She just couldn’t do it, even though she’d agreed to put in the separate entrance. She stopped on the corner of a street she wasn’t familiar with and looked around for the first time. Calm down, she told herself, but she was calm. Almost too calm. Why was that? Because he couldn’t leave her, and that was her ultimate fear. She laughed, a raucous burst that made several people who were waiting for the light to change step away from her, the woman in the Burberry coat with the smudged mascara. But it was funny, wasn’t it? She was afraid of the thing that couldn’t happen. The smile wilted from her lips. It wasn’t that he couldn’t leave, it was that he wanted to and couldn’t. Perhaps it was too much to ask after what she’d done, but she just wanted her husband to love her…to want to be with her.

She’d somehow walked home, wound herself through streets she rarely drove down until she’d reached the opposite end of Greenlake Park and was now standing in front of her own house—a mess of wet clothes and running face paint. Her car was still in the parking lot at work. She’d walked four miles and hardly noticed. The last thing Winnie wanted to do was schlep all the way back to the office just as people were coming back from lunch. If people from work saw her show up, drenched, to pick up her car, they’d assume the worst. They were always looking for something scandalous to chew on; it made the days go by faster. And the worst they could imagine would not be as bad as what Winnie had actually done. She’d have to take an Uber to work tomorrow, concoct some story to go with it. She decided that she’d tell Nigel she’d left work to find her car battery dead. That would be enough. She was back to her old ways: sweeping pieces of her crazy under the rug.