She had expected the deception to cost her something — to lie awake churning with the effort of smiling at a man she was about to destroy.
Instead she slept better than she had in six months.
She understood, eventually, why: for six years she had been performing a marriage that wasn’t real, pouring her energy into pretending everything was fine when nothing was, and that performance had been exhausting because it had no end and no purpose, just a treadmill of appeasement running nowhere.
This performance was different.
This one had a destination.
Every gracious smile she gave Dorian, every gift she accepted, every sermon of Maeve’s she nodded through, was a brick laid in a wall that would come down on all of them at a time and place of her choosing.
It is not tiring to act, she discovered, when you know exactly why you’re doing it and exactly when the curtain falls.
She caught herself, once or twice, almost enjoying it — a dark, private amusement she wasn’t entirely proud of.
When Dorian fastened the designer watch around her wrist and looked into her eyes and said he wanted to be better, she thanked him with real warmth in her voice, and thought: you are standing in the exhibit that will end you, and you cannot see it, because you have never once looked closely enough at me to know what I am capable of. That was the thing none of them had ever understood about the quiet, useful, charity-case wife.
They had spent six years not looking at her.