I was halfway through explaining our vacation plans when I saw him delete the calendar invite I’d sent him. My mother-in-law had sent hers a minute before.
We were supposed to be a team, Casimir and I. But his family had a separate group chat, one I wasn’t in, where they planned our lives. Sunday dinners at their house, mandatory. Vacations at the same lake cabin they’d visited for thirty years, no exceptions. His mother, Paloma Iverson, had a key to our apartment and an opinion on everything from my job to the way I folded his shirts. Casimir would just shrug. “That’s just how she is, Leocadia. Don’t make a thing of it.”
I became the thing. The problem. The reason our dinners were tense and our holidays were strained. When Paloma’s friend’s daughter, a sweet, perpetually single woman named Hollis Fairbanks, started “stopping by” his office with homemade lunches, I was the one being unreasonable for feeling edged out. He said I was imagining the subtle ways they all worked to slot her into the space I was supposed to occupy. He called it my insecurity. I started to call it a fact.
The turning point wasn’t a scene. It was a Tuesday. He came home from another Sunday-planning session I hadn’t been invited to, smelling of his mother’s perfume and a home I had no part in. He didn’t even realize I’d been crying. He just asked if I’d picked up his dry cleaning.
I looked at this man I loved, this man who shared my bed and my name, and I didn’t recognize the stranger his family had made him. How do you fight for a marriage when your husband is fighting for another family? When do you stop questioning his loyalty and start questioning your own sanity? And when you finally decide to save yourself, is there any part of him left to save?
There is no cheating in this book.
