Instead I did the thing only another woman could do: I answered her the way women answer, with devastating warmth and a gift. I took the box — every cookie, every note, every offering she’d made to my husband, all of it untouched, all of it returned to me by the man she was so sure she could take — and I brought it to her party, in front of everyone she was trying to impress, and I gave it back to her as a hostess gift, with a smile and a card and not one raised voice.
It was the opposite of a scene. It was the calmest, warmest, most pleasant little act of devastation you’ve ever watched. And it worked precisely because it wasn’t angry. An angry wife looks threatened. A serene wife, handing back a rival’s every failed advance in a pretty box, in public, with a thank-you note, looks like a woman who was never worried for a second — because she wasn’t. I didn’t go to that barbecue to fight for my husband. I went to return some cookies that a seductress had wasted on a man who loved his wife.
Chapter 4: The Box in Her Backyard
I will remember Vanessa’s face for the rest of my life.
