Sam steeled himself. One of the less pleasant parts of his job was having to listen calmly to details of inhumane behavior. Every time he was told a new horror story, he had to resist the temptation to say, “Not really?” or, “You’re joking?” After everything he’d seen and heard in his years as a detective, he still couldn’t believe that his fellow human beings were capable of such depravity.

“Damon said nothing at first,” Verity went on. “I thought he might deny it. I had proof, and was psyching myself up to produce it if necessary. Then, after a long silence, he shrugged and said, ‘Of course I screw other women. What do you expect? You can’t let me down in the way you have and expect me not to retaliate. You’re lucky I didn’t duck out of the wedding.’” Verity repeated her ex-husband’s words without emphasis or tone. Sam guessed they’d been delivered to her rather more forcefully.

“I had no idea what he was talking about—not a clue. As far as I knew, I’d done nothing wrong. Damon had certainly never complained . . .”

Sam waited.

“It turned out he’d been trying to protect me from the devastating truth, but since I’d forced the issue, he decided I deserved to suffer. I wasn’t perfect. That was my crime: having imperfections. Hundreds of them. He started to list them, counting them off on his fingers as he went along: I was lax about shaving my legs and plucking my eyebrows; I kept clothes that were past their best and should have been tossed out long ago; I folded back corners of book pages instead of using a bookmark; I squeezed the toothpaste tube in the wrong place; I’d talked too much on this occasion, too little at that party. And those were the mild ones. It got worse: I drooled sometimes when I was asleep and made a mark on the pillowcase; the bathroom stank after I’d used it—not in the way that it would after anyone had used it, but . . . in an even worse way.”

Verity walked over to the window, turned her back on the room. “He also said I had a funny smell about me when we had sex, that it put him off. Horrible, horrible things, interspersed with the stupid stuff, as if there were no difference: the time I threw away the recycling in the wrong bin, after he’d carefully rinsed out jars and bottles. It took him nearly two hours to get me up to speed with everything about me that fell short of his ideals, and the really chilling thing was, he didn’t have any of it written down. That would have been frightening in a different way, but . . . it was all there in his head, stored away. He came out with it so effortlessly.”