Page 22 of Rich Little Liars

I should. I should get the recipe for the dish cooked in my kitchen with my ingredients by my friend for my husband. I should be grateful. I should feel lucky to have someone so generous and thoughtful in my life. That’s what was expected of me.

Instead, I felt like I was disappearing. Like Roxanne was slowly replacing me – better cook, better company, better everything – and neither she nor Daniel had noticed. Or maybe they had noticed but didn’t care. Maybe this new version of our household worked better for them. Maybe I was the problem.

After dinner, I excused myself early again. Work to finish, I said, though I had nothing pressing. I just needed to escape the living room where they’d settle in for another evening of easy conversation I wasn’t really part of.

From my desk upstairs, I could hear them. Not words, just sounds. The rise and fall of voices, the occasional burst of laughter. The comfortable rhythm of two people who enjoyed each other’s company.

I tried to work but couldn’t focus. Tried to read but the words blurred. Finally, I just sat there in the dark, listening to my husband and my friend being happy without me, and wondered when exactly I’d lost control of my own life.

It was past eleven when the front door finally closed. I heard Daniel’s footsteps on the stairs, heard him pause outside my study.

‘Kelly? You still working?’

‘Just finishing up.’

He pushed open the door. ‘You okay? You’ve been quiet tonight.’

‘Fine. Just tired.’

‘Maybe you should see the doctor. You’ve been tired a lot lately.’ He yawned, already turning away. ‘Don’t stay up too late. You need rest.’

Then he was gone, off to bed, and I sat in my dark office thinking about how he’d suggested I see a doctor rather than asking what was wrong. How tiredness was a medical problem to be fixed rather than a symptom of something deeper.

How I was fading from my own marriage, and nobody seemed to notice.

Nobody except me.

8

NOW

Four days drag by, and I start to believe I might survive this.

It’s a tentative belief – the kind that crumbles if you examine it too closely – but it’s there. A fragile thread of possibility that maybe, just maybe, things could be okay. The note hasn’t been followed up. No more envelopes. No more accusations. Just silence, which I’m choosing to interpret as retreat rather than gathering storm.

Richard comes by every evening now, sometimes with food, sometimes just himself. We talk about nothing important – his patients (anonymised, vague), my progress unpacking (exaggerated, optimistic), the town dynamics (a mad scramble for social power between the rich and even richer). We don’t talk about Daniel or the fire or the note I still haven’t told him about. We exist in a bubble where I’m just a woman getting to know a kind man, and nothing more complicated than that.

Last night, he stayed until past midnight. We sat on the couch with glasses of wine neither of us drank much of, and we talked about his ex-wife – a subject he’d been skirting around until now. She’d left him for a colleague, he said. Someone she’d worked with for years, someone Richard had considered a friend. The betrayal had been doubled – professional and personal, intertwined in ways that made it impossible to separate the hurt.

‘I blamed myself for ages,’ he said, his thumb tracing absent patterns on my hand. ‘Thought if I’d been more present, more attentive, less focused on work, she wouldn’t have strayed. But my therapist helped me see that people make their own choices. You can’t control someone else’s decisions, only your own response to them.’

I nodded like I understood, but inside I was thinking about control and choices and how the line between the two gets blurred when you’re desperate enough. How sometimes what looks like a decision is really just the only path left after you’ve closed all the other doors.

When he kissed me goodbye at the door – a proper kiss, not an explorative one like before – I felt something I hadn’t felt in months. Want. Not the desperate, drowning want of someone clinging to a life raft, but actual desire. The kind that makes your stomach flip and your thoughts drift to dangerous but exciting territories.

This morning, I wake up smiling.

It’s disorienting. I lie in bed staring at the ceiling, testing the feeling. Happiness. Or something adjacent to it. The absence of dread, at least. The morning light filters through the curtains in soft strips, and instead of immediately cataloguing everything I’m afraid of, I think about Richard. About the plans we made last night to go for a walk this weekend, away from East Hampton and its watching eyes.

I should feel guilty. That’s what people would expect – the rich, grieving widow moving on too quickly, dishonouring her husband’s memory by entertaining feelings for another man. Society has rules about these things, unwritten but rigid. A certain period of mourning is required. Public displays of sadness. The display of loss before you’re allowed to even think about moving forward.

But I don’t feel guilty.

I feel right.

The marriage had been in trouble for so long before the fire that sometimes I wonder if it would have ended in divorce anyway, given enough time. The tragedy of his death is real – the waste of a life, the violence of it, the horror. But the loss of a marriage? That had happened long before the flames. We’d been two people sharing a house, not a life. Polite strangers who’d forgotten how to be anything else. Who moved around each other like furniture, necessary but unremarkable.

The last time we’d really talked – not just exchanged information about bills and schedules but actually communicated – was probably six months before the fire. We’d become experts at existing in parallel, never quite touching, never quite separating. Just drifting further and further apart until the space between us felt insurmountable.