And the fourth was from a woman called Cressida.
***Did it happen tonight? If he gives you a makeup kit in the morning, don’t use it. Photograph it. It’ll be the same one.***
Cressida.
Cressida Vail was married to Dorian from 2013 to 2017.
His first wife. Who I had heard about, from him and from his mother, perhaps a dozen times in four years, always with the same adjectives. Unstable. Dramatic. Ungrateful. A difficult woman who made his life impossible and then left him with nothing but lawyers’ bills.
She found me in the May.
A message on a professional networking site, of all places, three weeks after the first time he hurt me.
Four lines. I have them still.
***You don’t know me. I was married to Dorian. I’m not writing to cause trouble. I’m writing because if anything has started, I want you to know it isn’t you, and that it doesn’t stop.***
And I did not reply for eleven days.
Because my first thought — and I want to write this down honestly — was the ex-wife is bitter.
That is exactly what I had been taught to think. And I thought it, word for word, in Georgiana’s voice.
And then, on the twelfth day, after the second time, I wrote back.
