And that — not the marriage certificate, not the two licence applications, not the fact that her wedding was void — that is the thing that broke her, in a coffee shop on Abercorn Street on a Wednesday afternoon, and she cried for about six minutes and I did not touch her because she had asked me not to, and a woman at the next table very quietly got up and moved.

Part Twenty-Two: What She Had Been Told

I want to lay out, once, what Christian Dupont had told Giselle Marchetti, because every time I have described this to somebody their first instinct is that she should have known, and because the construction is genuinely excellent and because I want it on the record that I lived with the man for three years and did not know either.

He told her he had been married.

He volunteered that in the first month, unprompted.

He told her it ended in 2019.