But I was going to be there.

Something in Brenda’s proposal crystallized my thinking, because of what it revealed about how these two people saw me.

In their plan, I was not a person.

I was a role, a function, the wife who cooks the dinner and dresses the home, and if the actual woman who held that role became inconvenient, she could simply be edited out and replaced with a cover story, away visiting family, and no one would be the wiser.

They were going to use my own home to stage a performance of a happy marriage, and paper over my absence with a lie, and carry on toward Liam’s promotion as though I and my abandoned daughter were a problem that had been tidily managed.