“My husband be@t me for refusing to live with my mother-in-law. Then he calmly went to bed. The next morning, he handed me a luxury makeup kit and said, “My mother’s coming for lunch. Cover that up and smile.”
The first thing I tasted was blood. The second was something I do not have a word for.
My husband had just hit me because I would not agree to his mother moving into our house for good.
And then he got into bed and went to sleep as though nothing had happened.
And the next morning, he handed me a very expensive makeup kit and said, perfectly calmly:
“Mother’s coming for lunch. Cover that and act normal.”
And that was the moment I understood he had no idea what I had been doing behind his back for four months.
Dorian stood over me in our bedroom with his sleeves rolled up and his breathing completely even. He looked irritated. Not ashamed. Irritated, the way he looks when a restaurant gets an order wrong.
The moon was coming through those big windows — the house at Harrow Point has windows the size of doors — and it cut his face into two pieces. One half the man I married. The other half somebody I had never actually met.
