He Spent Two Years Mocking How Tired I Looked While I Paid Every Bill. He Never Mentioned Whose Name Was on the Mortgage

I have gone back over that visit many times, and it is the cruelest part of the whole story, crueler in a way than the affair itself.

Because she knew.

As she stood in my kitchen telling me I looked tired, she was sleeping with my husband, and she knew it, and she came anyway.

She looked at the wreck two years of that betrayal had made of me — the hollows under my eyes, the hands raw from washing shirts in the sink she was now folding laundry beside — and instead of guilt, instead of shame, she felt something that let her play the ministering angel over the woman she was helping to destroy.

I have decided, in the end, that it was a performance for herself.