It was mine.

I made it for him, out of my own hope and my own loyalty, and I held it over his face myself, and called the thing behind it my husband.

He only had to take it off on the night he no longer needed it.

And the horror of that first moment in the kitchen was not only what he was saying.

It was the sudden understanding that the man I thought I had been married to had never existed at all — that I had loved a mask, and that the thing behind it had been watching me, patiently, the entire time.

Chapter 4 — Packing