The moment the bus footage surfaced, there was nothing beneath his image to catch him, and so he simply kept falling, through the clients and the reputation and then Eleanor, who had only been attached to the image in the first place.

I did not destroy Julian.

His image was the only thing he had ever built, and an image, it turns out, is a terrible thing to have built your whole life on, because it can be taken away by twenty seconds of the truth.

I had spent my marriage envying, a little, his ease in the world, his confidence, his glittering surface.

I understand now that I was envying a thing with nothing inside it.

Chapter 19 — The Cottage