“You humiliated me tonight,” he said.
I had my fingers against my cheek.
“Because I said no?”
And his jaw set.
“Because my mother asked for one reasonable thing.”
One reasonable thing.
Georgiana wanted to move in. Permanently. She wanted the main bedroom, because women of a certain age deserve comfort. She wanted the kitchen. She wanted the household accounts.
She wanted, in about four sentences over a crab starter, every part of my life that she did not already have.
And every evening for a year she had been filling his head with little comments. Small ones. Designed to take me out of my own marriage an inch at a time.
And at dinner, I said no.
Dorian smiled through dessert. Drove us home without a word. And the moment the front door shut behind us, he turned round.
Now he was standing over me turning his wedding ring, as though I were the problem he had to solve.
“You’ll apologise to her tomorrow.”
I looked up at him from the floor.
He wanted tears. Begging. Fear.
I gave him nothing at all.
And somehow that made him angrier than screaming would have.
“You think you’re independent?” Very quietly. “Everything you have is mine. My house. My money. My name.”
