Chapter 19
THEN
Daniel came back three days later.
I hadn’t asked him to. Hadn’t called or texted or given any indication that I was ready to see him. But there he was on our doorstep, overnight bag in hand, looking like a man who’d rehearsed his apology in the mirror until he could deliver it without flinching.
‘I know you said you needed space,’ he began before I could speak. ‘But I can’t stay away any more. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t think about anything except how badly I’ve messed things up.’
I stood in the doorway, blocking his entry, and tried to work out what I was feeling. Anger, yes. Betrayal, certainly. But underneath all that, something more complicated. Something that felt almost like relief at not being alone in this house with nothing but my thoughts for company.
‘You should have called first,’ I said.
‘Would you have answered?’
‘Probably not.’ I’d been ignoring his texts for days, deleting his voicemails without listening, pretending I could make him disappear simply by refusing to acknowledge his existence.
‘Kelly, please.’ His voice cracked. ‘Let me come home. Let me try to fix this.’
I should have said no. Should have told him to go back to The Brenton and give me more time to think. But I was tired. So tired of being angry and hurt and alone. And some pathetic part of me still wanted to believe we could salvage something from the wreckage.
‘Fine,’ I heard myself say. ‘But we’re talking. Properly. About everything.’
He nodded, relief flooding his face, and I stepped aside to let him in.
The conversation that followed was nothing like I’d expected. I’d imagined confrontation. Accusations. Daniel begging for forgiveness while I catalogued every way he’d hurt me. Instead, something stranger happened.
He started asking questions.
‘When did you first start suspecting Roxanne?’ he asked, sitting across from me at the kitchen table. ‘Before you caught us, I mean. When did you decide she was a problem?’
‘I didn’t decide anything. I just noticed things.’
‘What things?’
‘The way she looked at you. The way she kept turning up at the house. The way she was always here, always invading our lives.’
Daniel nodded slowly, as if considering this. ‘And you never thought… I mean, it didn’t occur to you that you might be misreading the situation?’
‘Misreading?’ I stared at him. ‘Daniel, I caught you in bed with her.’
‘We were kissing. That’s all. You walked in before anything actually happened.’
‘Before anything…’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘You were half-undressed. She was in her bra. In our bed.’
‘I know. And that was wrong. I’m not saying it wasn’t.’ He leaned forward, his expression earnest. ‘But nothing actually happened, Kelly. You stopped it before it went anywhere. And I think that matters. I think that should count for something.’
‘Count for something? You were about to have sex with another woman!’
‘About to. But I didn’t. We didn’t.’ His voice remained calm.
Reasonable. Like he was explaining something obvious to a child.
‘And I’ve been thinking about this, really thinking, and I wonder if you’re blowing this out of proportion because of all the suspicions you’d already built up about Roxanne.
You convinced yourself she was some kind of predator, and now you’re seeing what happened through that lens. ’
The logic was dizzying. I felt myself grasping for solid ground that kept shifting beneath my feet.
‘I saw what I saw,’ I said quietly.
‘You saw a kiss. A moment of weakness that I immediately regretted. And yes, we were on the bed, and yes, things might have escalated if you hadn’t come home.
But they didn’t escalate. That’s the point.
’ Daniel shook his head. ‘I’m not excusing my behaviour.
But there’s a difference between a terrible mistake that got interrupted and an actual affair.
And the way you’ve been acting, it’s like you caught us in the middle of…
I don’t know. Something much worse than what it was. ’
‘Something much worse,’ I repeated flatly. ‘How many times do I have to repeat this before the severity registers with you: you had another woman in our bed.’
‘And I’m sorry. I’ve said I’m sorry a hundred times. But you’ve been treating me like a monster when what I am is a man who made a stupid, impulsive mistake in a moment of weakness. A mistake that never even got completed because you walked in.’
I opened my mouth to argue, then closed it again.
Because some tiny, treacherous part of me was listening.
Nothing had actually happened. Technically.
The sex I’d imagined, the full betrayal I’d been nursing for days – it existed only in my imagination of what would have occurred if I’d arrived ten minutes later.
‘Kelly.’ Daniel reached out and took my hand.
‘I love you. I want us to work. But for that to happen, you need to consider the possibility that you’ve catastrophised this into something bigger than it was.
You were already paranoid about Roxanne – you’d been suspicious of her for weeks before any of this happened.
And I wonder if that paranoia is colouring how you’re processing what you actually saw. ’
‘Excuse me? This is far from just paranoia. You were two seconds from having sex with her, Daniel! Pouring our marriage down the drain for a quick—’
‘Are you sure? Because from where I’m sitting, you spent weeks treating an innocent woman like a threat. Watching her every move. Analysing her every word. Convincing yourself she was plotting something when she was just being friendly.’
‘And it turns out I was right the whole time! Because—’
He squeezed my hand gently. ‘And then when you caught us in a moment of weakness – a moment I’m deeply ashamed of, don’t get me wrong – you immediately jumped to the worst possible conclusion. An affair. A conspiracy. An ongoing seduction.’
‘That’s not—’
‘Come on. You texted her telling her you’d make her regret ever knocking on our door. That’s not a proportionate response to a kiss, Kelly. That’s something else. That’s… that worries me.’
I felt the ground shifting again. My threat to Roxanne, which had felt righteous at the time, now sounded unhinged when he said it back to me. Disproportionate. Paranoid.
‘She was trying to take you from me,’ I said, but my voice sounded uncertain.
‘Or was she a lonely woman who developed feelings she shouldn’t have, in a situation that got out of hand?
’ Daniel’s thumb stroked across my knuckles.
‘I think you created a villain because you needed someone to blame. For the distance between us. For all the problems we’ve been having.
It was easier to point at Roxanne and say “she’s the enemy” than to look at us. At what we’ve become.’
The words landed somewhere deep. Because he wasn’t entirely wrong. I had been looking for someone to blame. Had been cataloguing Roxanne’s transgressions from the moment she arrived, searching for proof that my marriage was being attacked from the outside rather than crumbling from within.
‘I don’t know what to think any more,’ I admitted.
‘That’s okay. We’ll figure it out together.’ Daniel squeezed my hand. ‘But I need you to try. To really try to see things from a different perspective. Can you do that? For us?’
He was gaslighting me in the worst possible way, but I nodded anyway. Because what else could I do? My husband was sitting here offering reconciliation, offering an explanation that made me the unreasonable one, and I was too exhausted to fight any more.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘I’ll try.’
He smiled. That familiar smile I’d fallen in love with years ago. And for a moment, I let myself believe everything would be fine.
The following weeks were strange. Daniel had resumed his place in our bed as if nothing had happened. He was attentive in ways he hadn’t been in months – cooking dinner, asking about my work, touching me casually as he passed. All the gestures of a devoted husband trying to make amends.
But underneath the surface sweetness, something had shifted.
It started with small corrections. I’d mention something that happened and Daniel would frown slightly, tilt his head.
‘That’s not quite how I remember it,’ he’d say. Or: ‘Are you sure? Because I was there, and I don’t think those were her exact words.’
At first I argued. But he was always so calm, so reasonable, so certain of his version of events that eventually I’d find myself backing down. Maybe I had misremembered. Maybe my perception wasn’t as reliable as I thought.
Then there were the conversations about Roxanne.
‘I ran into her at the shops today,’ Daniel said one evening. ‘She asked about you.’
My stomach tightened. ‘What did you say?’
‘That you’re doing better. That we’re working through things.’ He glanced at me. ‘She feels terrible about what happened. She never meant to hurt you.’
‘She was half naked in our bed with my husband.’
‘She was kissing your husband. There’s a difference.’ He shook his head. ‘And I think you’re directing all your anger at her when really this was a failure between us. Between you and me. A failure you contributed to just as much as I did. Probably more.’
Every conversation seemed to land here. At my failure. My contribution to the collapse of our marriage. My suspicions that had apparently created the very problem I was trying to prevent.
‘Maybe you should talk to someone,’ Daniel suggested one night. ‘A professional. Just to work through some of these feelings.’
‘I don’t need a therapist.’
‘There’s no shame in getting help. And frankly, I’m worried about you. You’re still jumpy. Still suspicious. Still acting like what happened was some kind of planned attack when it was just two people making a stupid mistake in a moment they both regret.’
‘She regrets it?’
‘Of course she does. She’s devastated. She lost her only friend because of one moment of weakness.’ Daniel looked at me with what appeared to be genuine concern. ‘And I think if you could just talk to her – hear her out – you might realise this wasn’t the grand conspiracy you’ve built it into.’
‘I’m not talking to Roxanne.’
‘I’m not saying you have to. I’m just saying it might help you move past this. Because right now, you’re stuck. Obsessing over something that was never as big as you’ve made it in your head.’
I wanted to scream at him. To remind him that I’d caught them seconds away from sex, that the only reason it hadn’t happened was my accidental early arrival.
But every time I tried to articulate this, he’d find a way to minimise it.
To reframe it and make me feel like I was the one being unreasonable.
‘I think I’m going to go for a walk,’ he said one Saturday afternoon, pulling on his jacket. ‘Clear my head a bit. I’ll be back in an hour or so.’
I nodded, not really listening, focused on the book I wasn’t actually reading. The door closed behind him and I sat in the silence of our house, turning pages without seeing words. When had I lost the ability to trust my own perceptions?
The knock came twenty minutes later.
I knew before I opened the door. Something in the nature of the knock – tentative, apologetic – told me exactly who was standing on the other side.
Roxanne.
She looked smaller than I remembered. Paler. The confident woman who’d made herself at home in my kitchen had been replaced by someone who looked genuinely nervous. She wore jeans and a simple sweater, no makeup, her light hair pulled back in a messy ponytail.
‘Before you slam the door,’ she said quickly, ‘I just want to talk. Five minutes. That’s all I’m asking.’
‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’
‘Please, Kelly.’ Her eyes were wet. ‘I know you hate me. You have every right to hate me. But I can’t stand the thought of you believing I’m some kind of monster when really I’m just a person who made a horrible mistake.’
‘A mistake?’
‘Yes. A terrible, stupid, unforgivable mistake that I will regret for the rest of my life.’ She wrapped her arms around herself like she was cold, though the afternoon was mild.
‘I never meant for any of this to happen. You have to believe that. You were my friend. My only friend. And I destroyed it because I was weak and lonely and Daniel was… he was kind to me. And I let that kindness turn into something it never should have become.’
I stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, watching her perform contrition. Because that’s what this was, wasn’t it? Another manipulation designed to worm her way back into my life.
But Daniel’s voice echoed in my head. Paranoid. Disproportionate. Catastrophising. Maybe she was genuine. Maybe she really was just a lonely woman who’d made a mistake. Maybe I’d built her into a villain because it was easier than examining the cracks in my own marriage.
‘Daniel’s not here,’ I said.
‘I know. I saw him leave.’ She must have seen something shift in my expression because she added quickly: ‘I wasn’t stalking him.
I was walking past and I saw him go. And I thought…
I thought maybe this was my chance. To talk to you alone.
Without him in the middle making everything more complicated. ’
‘What do you want me to say, Roxanne? That I forgive you? That we can go back to being friends?’
‘I don’t expect that. I don’t deserve that.
’ She wiped at her eyes. ‘I just want you to know how sorry I am. And that I understand if you never want to see me again. But if there’s any chance – any chance at all – that we could at least talk properly.
Hear each other out. Then I think maybe we could both find some peace. ’
I should have closed the door in her face and gone back to my book and my silence and my slowly eroding sense of reality.
But I was tired. Tired of being angry – of second-guessing myself. Tired of Daniel’s constant suggestions that I was the unreasonable one, the paranoid one, the one blowing everything out of proportion.
Maybe talking to Roxanne would prove him right. Maybe I’d see that she really was just a flawed human being who’d made a mistake. Maybe I’d finally be able to let this go.
Or maybe I’d see through her act completely, and I’d have proof that my instincts had been right all along. Either way, I needed to know.
I sighed and opened the door wider.
‘Five minutes,’ I said. ‘That’s all you get.’
Roxanne nodded, relief flooding her pale features, and stepped inside.