The rage doesn’t leave his eyes, but his mouth forms a smile to mimic mine. “Jane’s never done anything I can’t forgive. It’s what she hasn’t done that’s the problem.”

“What?” she wails. “What haven’t I done? There’s not one single thing I haven’t done for you! Name it!”

I recognize that sound. I’ve never heard it, apart from inside myself: boiling fury, silenced for years.

Tasker doesn’t look at her. He keeps his eyes on me. “She’s never read any of my books,” he says. “Can’t stand violence. Even the misery memoirs she reads, she skips the nasty bits—don’t you, wifey? Pretty pointless, really, when the nasty bits are the whole point of that particular genre.”

I watch Jane. She’s frozen. Her skin is gray. A Pompeii volcanic-ash woman.

Adam and I went to Sorrento for our honeymoon. We went on a day trip to Pompeii. The coach was too hot, and we didn’t take enough water, and all the shops had sold out—there were too many tourists. We wished we’d stayed in Sorrento, lounging by the swimming pool.

I’m going to see Adam again. If Tasker were intending to kill me, he’d have done it by now. He doesn’t want to hurt me; he wants to talk. I’ll talk to him for as long as it takes, until I think of a way out of this room.

“I didn’t think I’d be able to kill a man, because of the violence involved,” said Jane quietly. “Reuben’s right—I can’t read about it. In books, it’s presented in a way to make you care, though, isn’t it? Books make you feel upset about violence. In real life, there’s no one in charge behind the scenes steering your feelings in a particular direction. You just do it, and it . . . it’s not so bad.”

“Remember your ad, Nicki?” Reuben asks. “‘I Want a Secret’? You said you wanted someone who would leave no stone unturned in his determination to find out every secret thing there is to know about you. You promised to reciprocate.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“That’s how I knew you were the one for me. You’d have read my novels—every one, cover to cover. How can you claim to love someone who puts their whole heart and soul into their work and completely ignore that work? How can you think that any amount of admin and cooking and cleaning and fucking can compensate for such a blatant lack of interest in the person you’re married to?” His anger’s building again.

“Why didn’t you say something?” asks Jane. It’s strange: she doesn’t seem to be scared anymore. “If I’d known it mattered to you that much—”