Let me set the scene.

INTERIOR — MELISSA’S STUDIO: Sunday morning, June 23, 6:22 a.m., Berkeley, California. No sign of a cloud through the skylight. I have stolen most of the dove grey duvet from Alex in my sleep, though he is unaware of it as he is unperturbed in his snoring, his legs dangling off the end of the bed (as always).

I have woken from the recurring dream where I am convinced there is a haunted room in my house, I mean, my old house in Pasadena. Julian keeps the room locked tight but I can look through the keyhole sometimes: blue floral wallpaper, floorboards painted white, and one tatty but gilded Louis XIV-style chair with a faded burgundy velvet seat and back. Sunlight pours through a window trimmed with gauzy white curtains; motes of dust pass through the air in the room. Every time I ask Julian if the room is haunted, he tells me I am being fanciful again. I do not have a key, but even if I did, I do not want to open it lest I let the ghosts in there out into the house. One time, I saw an eye at the keyhole, and it looked either like my eye or Julian’s, but I’ve never known which. I am equally fascinated and repulsed by the room. Alex says it sounds like a garbled version of the Bluebeard tale; perhaps it is.

I know it is 6:22 a.m. because I am sitting up, looking at my phone, which is blaring the incoming Hangouts video chat sound. Incoming video call from Rizzo.

[A note here on nicknames: Miranda has been “Rizzo” since Alex’s wedding reception, and unbeknownst to me, I have been “Sandy” since I lived in Bristol. Miranda had bestowed the nickname on me shortly after the party incident, declaring me to be as “squeaky clean and desperately irritating”as Olivia Newton-John’s pre-sluttified character in the movie Grease. I did not know this, but apparently watching Grease is a thing people in Britain do still, or at least did back in 2005. I was completely ignorant until 2011 that Amanda, Minty, Sasha and above all Miranda referred to me regularly as “Sandy,” unless I was present. Miranda was dubbed Rizzo at the reception because (1) when I found out I was Sandy, the booze which was swooshing in my stomach told me she needed a matching nickname, too and (2) well, why she should be Betty Rizzo when I’m Sandy should be pretty apparent by now.]

I accept the call, despite knowing that my face will be puffy from sleep and my hair is a nest on top of my head in a silk scrunchie. I accept, because if I reject the call I’ll just get another one in two minutes.

“Rizz,” I whisper, trying in vain to avoid disturbing Alex, whose snoring has now given way to a grunt of frustration at having been woken. “Is everything okay?”

“SANDY!” Miranda booms. Unlike me, Miranda looks radiant, made up and coiffed. She is also wearing clothing, unlike me — a kelly green blouse with a pussy bow. She cut off much of her long hair several years ago for a highly-angled lob, though she still goes through pink lip gloss in industrial amounts. (She buys Juicy Tubes in Tickled Pink by the gross, just in case it gets discontinued.) Years ago she tried wearing red, but she said it made her look “like a reject from a Pedro Almodovar film” so back to pink it was.

“Miranda… it’s 6:22 here. In the morning. Sunday morning.” Alex has now transitioned into being fully awake and is backhandedly swatting at me, telling me to “hang up on her, for fuck’s sake.”

“Oh shit. Sweetie, I’m so wretched with time zones. I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean…” Miranda pauses, peers closer to the screen of her phone. “Oh fucking hell, Alex! Darling!”

“Fuck OFF, Miranda.” Alex covers his mussed-up head with a pillow, tries to wrest more of the duvet from me, with partial success.

“Alex, you look tired. Melissa, is he sleeping enough? What’s his drinking like these days?” Miranda’s clearly delighted that she can tease Alex, but it is Sunday morning, after all.

“fuck off, Miranda,” sotto voce, from under the pillow.

“Rizz, I’ll put some clothes on and we can talk outside. Just putting the phone down for a second.” While I’m pulling a grey “Best Coast” sweatshirt over my head and cramming my bottom half into a pair of black leggings, I can hear Miranda continue to needle Alex. (“Alexander, sweetie, you do know I saw your arse there for a second. Not that I hadn’t before, of course, and it is a nice one, but you should know you’re looking rather pale overall at the moment. I thought California was supposed to be sunny?”)

Alex moves the pillow from his face and looks at me with a look of disgust mixed with disappointment. “Melissa, I love you, but please hang up on this fucking ARSEHOLE who has no compunction about waking me up out of a fucking wonderful dream to tell me she can see my arse.”

Miranda is whooping now, great cascades of laughter. I scoop up the phone, switch on my wireless headphones and grab a seltzer from the mini-fridge on my way into the garden. Alex emits one last great harrumph before I close the studio door.

And… scene.

The garden was still damp with the morning dew, and I had to wipe dry my green Adirondack chair with my sweatshirt arm before I could slide into it. I tucked my bare feet beneath me, my ancient pink Crocs forgotten at the studio door.

“Rizz, I’ve missed you,” I told her truthfully. Miranda and I usually speak once a week, but she’s been on holiday with her parents in Provence for two weeks, in a holiday cottage with a lovely pool and a gourmet kitchen, but dial up internet and no mobile reception. (“Like the Dark Ages, darling, just less Black Death and more champagne,” her last email told me.)

“Come with me next time. I’ll have an excuse not to stay with my parents.” Miranda’s parents are genuinely wonderful people, two shy academics who met in Seville and were graced with this changeling child. Miranda’s dad once told me that he was changing her nappy when she was seven months old and she shot him what he could only describe as a condescending yet indulgent look. Like, “There, there, we both know this is necessary and I know you’re doing as best as you can considering, but do hurry up. “

“I wish I could.” I sipped at the seltzer, and propped my phone against a tea candle lantern resting on the small cast iron coffee table Steve placed out for me. “Ask me next year, let’s see where Alex and I are.”

“Melissa,” she said breathily, tucking her hair behind her ears. “Are you two… you know…”

“Not yet. I mean, no. No. I haven’t even dropped a hint.” Due to his visa status, Alex can’t stay here indefinitely. His visa doesn’t automatically make him eligible for a green card. He could be reclassified so that his stay here doesn’t have an expiration date, but right now, he is here for only another 16 months, with a possible two year extension. Of course if we marry, which is what Miranda was hinting at, that becomes moot. It’s a timer that ticks away, and which Alex and I do not speak of, or at least yet.

“Well, good. I love you both, but you probably need some more time to live on your own. And for Alex to… I don’t know. I probably know him better than you do and he’s still so opaque to me.” Miranda tilted her heart-shaped face on the screen, her brows knit down in concern. “He is kind to you still, I hope.”

“Miranda, Alex is… the very best person I know, have ever known. Every day he tells me how he is the one who is the lucky one in our relationship, how I make his life more than just bearable, that he’s not just enduring another day. He has hope again, says he can plan more than a week in the future, and that future is with me, if I wish to keep hanging in there for him. Given what he’s been through, what with Lucy and the startup and his family, I don’t blame him for his bitterness. I’m the lucky one though. I put him through hell, too, for so many years and he still wanted me in his life.”

Miranda’s face softened. “Right. Well, you must tell me if he changes, because I don’t really have much concern about any repercussions that might come from me kicking him in the groin. Hard.” She paused, and looked away from the camera for a moment before returning to face me. “You should know Julian is spreading some nasty gossip about you. That’s why I called — I just put down the phone with Amanda, who was only too delighted to tell me.”

Ugh, Amanda. Julian’s ex, and the only one of our old set that never eventually embraced me. Even though she and Jules had been broken up for months before he and I started dating, she took our romance and eventual marriage as a personal affront. I was, in her opinion, a unflattering facsimile of her own gleaming self: instead of her “glorious red hair” I was a “dowdy strawberry blonde”; while we were both art historians, her concentration was in 19th century Indian art, which was “far more important” than my focus on late 18th century English domestic art and decor; and of course, I was American, the biggest sin of all. Julian’s mum, Jocasta, thought Amanda would have been a far more appropriate bride for her darling boy, and frequently irritated me by calling me “Amanda” accidentally-on purpose. And despite Alex’s dismissive comments about her at Charlie and Will’s party, he eventually ended up dating Amanda too. Well, “dating” isn’t what I’d call it, but Alex gave me a hard stare when I referred to her as his “former fuck buddy.”

My brain was racing, however, not with thoughts of what Amanda might think about me, but rather what lies Julian was trafficking in. With his message of “game on” I’d passed to Alex, it really could be almost anything, but certainly was meant to undermine Alex’s faith in me.

I twisted my sweatshirt hem in my right hand and sucked the early morning air through my teeth. “Do you want me to go first?”

Miranda swallowed. “Why don’t you tell me what happened last Sunday in Los Angeles.”

So I told her. I told Miranda about Rachel and Santa Barbara, about Bottega Louie and Julian’s surprise appearance. I told her how charming and affable and relaxed he was, how he manipulated me into coming to his apartment after I’d let down my guard despite my depth of experience in all things Julian. About the beautiful apartment and feeling cocooned in glass, safe safe safe, and the coffee and the coffee table, and how I dreamed that perhaps Julian and I could have one of those modern friendships that can arise after a divorce. I told her about the wedding china and the macarons, and how he traced the lines of my hand and how when our knees touched I felt something again that reminded me I’d never be safe, never been safe, with Julian. How he slapped the table and I worried for one brief moment that it might have been me instead against his palm. And how he blamed me for Alex’s intransigent refusal to comply with Julian’s demands. I mentioned, with some shame at my naivete, that I had hugged him in spite of my fear of him, that I had for one thought, wanted to feel — literally, I suppose — the protection Julian had always offered me. And how Julian had taken advantage of this error in judgment to kiss me and try to kiss me again, even after I’d pushed him away. Above all, I told her how furious and embarrassed I was for ever believing I could trust him.

Miranda listened without interrupting. She shook her head occasionally, sighed once in a while, but held her counsel. She waited a beat after I finished. “Well, that sounds far more plausible than the story I heard secondhand today. Before I go any further, how much have you told our dear old Alexander?” Even though Miranda and Alex ended their on-and-off, hot-and-cold-and-hot again relationship in the mutually assured destruction they’d always threatened, he eventually relented to her bossy, bitchy self when she demanded his friendship at a time she sorely needed it. (Ah, many stories for other times.) Despite Alex’s wishing she would “fuck off,” he doted on her, and Miranda would probably gladly take a pair of pruning shears to anyone who threatened the safety and happiness of her “dear old Alexander.”

“Almost all of it.” I squirmed a little, shoved my legs under my sweatshirt. “I didn’t mention the kiss, or Julian making me feel unsafe. I think… we both know what Alex can be like when he feels he can’t control his life.”

I don’t mean to imply that Alex can be violent when he feels events are outstripping his power to direct them. Oh gosh, no. No. He shuts down, shuts out the world, returns mentally to that hermitage he made for himself first back at home in the attic of his terrible old house, then in the forest bordering the school where he first met Julian, and then in his rooms in the first year halls and eventually his flat with Julian. Closes everyone out, and the world stops for him. To be sure, first there’s yelling and swearing and stomping and cursing the bastard who has brought him misfortune. There’s whisky or beer or whatever he can put his hands on. There’s that goddamn Arab Strap album he and I bonded over. It’s so loud and then… silence. It’s the silence I fear the most because he is back in that attic outside Pitlochry with the falling-in roof and the ghosts (mostly figurative) of his forebears. And it’s hell bringing him back.

Miranda nodded in understanding. “I think it may have looked like the right choice at the time. But you may have to reassess that decision. The version I heard — filtered through Amanda, of course — is that you chose to stay somewhere very near Julian’s flat, so that you might bump into him quite by accident. He commented on your Instagram post that he was in Seattle, even though it wasn’t true, so that you’d be put off his scent. And your meeting in that restaurant? Why wouldn’t he stop into its bakery with the scrumptious little macarons that was less than five minutes from his flat? After all, he regularly kept them in his own kitchen. Your meeting was pure chance, by his telling.

“You invited yourself up to his flat, begging to see where he lived so that you could ‘picture him’ properly. He gave in, perhaps from an overabundance of sentiment; he’s always been too weak when you’re involved.”

“Hah!” I exclaimed. “Too weak? Too weak? He steered me up there — if anyone was weak, it was me.”

“Oh yes, poor Julian was quite swept away by all the happy memories you once shared before you ripped his life from him. Of course, once up there, you told him that you and Alex were on rocky ground, that Alex bossed you about and forbade you from owning a car, so that you were forced to walk everywhere or use public transport. You just want a normal, happy life with a few luxuries, and Alex can’t provide any of that for you, and you feel an utter fool for ever believing the lies he sold you. Oh, and for good measure, Alex is sponging off of you, using his sad life to extract a sizeable sum from each of your support payments.”

“Jesus. Not a word of that is true, Rizz. I do walk everywhere and use public transit, but it is my choice alone. Alex and I are solid. And I don’t want more luxuries or anything different than what Al and I have built from nothing, from our ruined lives.” I pulled my knees up further and rested my chin there. “Please tell me that he isn’t talking about the kiss.”

“Of course he is! You think that little shit could resist recounting how he got one over on Al? But in his telling, it was you who made the first move. You pushed him down on his sofa and jammed your tongue in his mouth, saying you were ‘so lonely’ because you and Alex aren’t having sex at all, and you miss Julian so much. And Julian, fool that he is, let himself be led to his bachelor bed where you took advantage of him.” Miranda made a gagging sound and mimed sticking her finger down her throat. “That was the moment when I knew this was all a put-up job — talk about over-egging the pudding! Exhibit one, Alex. We both know he’s exceptionally good in bed for a maths nerd and rarely one to pass up an opportunity for — what did he use to call it? — oh yes. ‘Carnal embrace.’ The two of you waited years to have the chance to fuck each other with giddy abandon and now we’re all to believe Alex has gone off you? Pffffffft.”

I could not argue with any of this.

Miranda was really working herself up now, grinning and fairly bouncing with having figured out the truth before verifying it with me. “Exhibit two, Julian. Now darling, don’t get me wrong. Julian is a very handsome man these days. Perhaps — and never tell our dear heart this — more handsome than Alex now that he’s grown into his features. But he is still that arrogant, vulgar, vicious, preening little bell-end I knew when he was 18. He duped you for too long, and Amanda appears to still be susceptible to his particular brand of bullshit, despite my best efforts. And now we’re all to believe that he couldn’t bear to see you so lonely, so out of nostalgia and indulgence he let you make love to him, one last time? Preposterous!”

Again, Miranda’s reasoning was sound. Even thinking about choosing to share myself again with Julian again made me feel queasy. In the last four months we were together, we had sex nearly constantly, almost every day I wasn’t having my period, in his relentless pursuit of having a child. Even when we were in Suffolk that terrible New Year’s, when Alex was only one door down the hallway, Julian made sure we made time for procreation. It really was the most terrible sex at that point, totally perfunctory and tedious. I would make mental lists of things I needed to pick up as presents for people back in California while Julian just did what he believed he needed to do. Or I would squeeze my eyes shut so hard I could see colors and lights and Alex’s face instead of my husband’s. To my utter mortification, the afternoon before we returned to London, Julian was so loud that Alex knocked on the wall and shouted at us to have some dignity.

As afternoon turned to dusk that day, Sasha cajoled Julian into taking her to Saxmundham to load up on more champagne and Marlboro Lights for our last night together. Alex took advantage of my hypervigilant husband’s absence to take a brief turn around the back garden with me, under the pretense that he wanted company while he had a cigarette. I looped my arm through his while we walked mostly silently amongst the bare rosebushes. The sky was so, so clear after the foggy and rainy day we’d trudged through after we’d left the pub. Even through my sensible wool sweater and turtleneck and scarf and duffel coat the freezing air prickled my skin. Our cheeks ruddied in the chill and our breath hung in the air before us as we progressed our lazy trail.

“Melissa,” Alex said, finally breaking the silence. “Earlier today…” He stopped and turned me to face him. “He was sending me a signal. I had to respond. I apologize if I embarrassed you.”

My cheeks reddened even further. “I don’t know what you mean, Al.” My mouth went quickly dry and I thought the air had been sucked out of my lungs by the frigid atmosphere.

“All that performative exertion, the ‘listen to me fucking my WIFE, you disgusting sack of shit’ that he inflicted on me while he pumped away at you. Like he was marking you, Mel. He knows. We’re done for.” Alex lit a fresh Silk Cut off the dying embers of the one he’d smoked down to the filter, and stubbed the dead one into the damp earth. He took my arm again as we commenced another circuit.

I knew he was right, and I was terrified. As much as I resented Julian and his high-handedness, his passive-aggression, his gaslighting and his tendency to treat me back then as only a potential incubator for his offspring, I still loved him. And as much as Alex represented the possibility of breaking out of the tower Julian wanted to keep me stored safely in, I knew that tower. That tower was the only home I’d known since I’d agreed to be his wife. Something new and uncharted with Alex might be even worse than just staying in the comfortable hell I inhabited with Julian.

“What do we do now?” I said, partly to Alex, but mostly to myself. My gaze was focused on the garden floor, on the footprints we’d left from our last sketch of the perimeter.

Alex didn’t respond at first. As we walked, he smoked furiously, and kicked the occasional stone out of the way, kicked even at stones that weren’t in the way.

Eventually: “It’s not me I’m worried about. What’s he going to do to me? Punch me in the face? I can take him any day. I could wipe him off the face of this planet if I chose. No, I worry about you.”

We stopped again, this time behind the little blue garden shed in the far southwestern corner of Annabelle’s property. We were invisible to the house here, though we could still see each other as night began to fully overtake the day. Alex’s breath was feathery plumes in the dying light as he turned me around in a pirouette. “Look at you, Mel. Just look at you. Fuck me, you’re more gorgeous and brilliant than the first night I saw you. The 23rd of September.”

He remembered.

He took me, finally, in his arms and rested his chin on the crown of my head, just as he still does now. It felt like I had been holding my breath for seven years and I had finally exhaled. “He didn’t destroy you. I always worried he would kill the girl I met that night. He certainly tried and you got very, very close to becoming fully Mrs. Cranford. But Ms. de Mornay, I love you. I love you completely. And when Julian calls us out, I will be here for you. You will never wonder again if you are loved, if you deserve to be loved.”

Alex sighed and held me closer. “I am not a perfect man, Mel, I don’t even have to tell you that. I am too cynical, too tired, too dark, too beaten up sometimes. I was a bad husband and though I try so hard to be a good father, I’m not. I let Lucy down, and Araminta will raise her to know that. I am good at one thing, and that is making money for other people, not myself. Don’t fool yourself that I’m some romantic, Gothic soul in need of saving. I’m not. I’m mostly a failure who’s conned a few institutions into thinking I’m not.”

Alex stopped to bend down and kiss my cheek, then drew me close again. “I can’t give you the life Julian does. I have certain obligations that prevent that.” He paused. Pressed to his chest, I heard the steady thu-thud, thu-thud of his heart through his sweater. “But I’d like to think that there is an ‘after’ for us, even if the getting there doesn’t come necessarily so happily to start.”

I opened a little space between us so I could see his face, the long nose, the red cheeks, the black brows that tilted up as if waiting for me to answer his unspoken question: Will you leave your husband before he leaves you? I didn’t have an answer yet. My thoughts were a knotted pile of cords, and I could not find an end to start unpicking the tangle.

“Alex… there will be an ‘after.’ There has to be, I know I can’t keep waking up every day in bed with him, tending to his needs, ignoring my own. I can’t imagine raising a child with him.” I took a step back. “It has to end. But I’m not sure how to escape. If I try to leave, how do I know he won’t make it near impossible to depart? He’ll just do what he always does — shame me into compliance. And if that doesn’t work, Julian will throw money at the problem — either at me, or at whatever lawyer he hires to pummel me.”

Alex took my hand and raised my wrist to his lips, just as he started to that night we first met except this time, he kissed it. “Stop believing the lies he feeds you that you are weak and you need someone — him — to protect you. You are enough. I will be with you whenever you need me, whenever I can leave London to be with you, but trust me. You are enough on your own. You’re awake for the first time in years and you hold the key to the castle keep.” He smiled and smoothed my hair. “Break yourself out, Sleeping Beauty.”

Miranda’s voice cut into my recollection of this moment, the liminal state I was in on that very last night in Theberton, just starting to exit my marriage with no idea what world I would find outside.

“You do know you’re going to have to tell Alex. He needs to hear about the kiss and how unsafe Julian made you feel from you, not from Charlie or Will or that wankstain Tom Gregory. How did he take it when you told him the bowdlerized version?”

“There was a lot of shouting and stomping about to begin with. Multiple threats to rent a car and drive down to LA immediately to separate Julian from his manhood. After he’d calmed down, I’d say exasperated more than anything else, and more than a little pleased that Julian was incensed at Alex’s insistence on attending the wedding. When I told him the ‘game on’ line, he actually cackled. Like, ‘Oh, “game on”? I’ll show you my game, you little shit, but you’re too fucking stupid to ever appreciate how I’ll be destroying you until you’re already in the ground.’ But he wasn’t mad at me or anything.” Alex knows I still find it hard to say no to people, even people I should have no problem refusing, like Julian or high school acquaintances peddling Lularoe leggings.

“Go do it, right now, San. Go back in there and tell him everything you left out. Then tell him what Julian’s saying. Is there anything else you’re holding back?”

I shook my head, even though I knew that wasn’t completely true. I wasn’t going to talk about Fennella, since it was very possible that I’d simply made up a threat out of Julian’s snide little comment. “You think I can do this?”

She snorted. “You think you can afford not to? Rip the plaster off, darling. I’m hanging up now, ping me later with what happens. Love you, Sandra Dee.” With a smack of her pink lips as a farewell, the window closed on my phone. Miranda was, of course, correct. Telling Alex the most uncomfortable parts of that afternoon was unavoidable unless I wanted to drive him deep into his hermitage, now established in the grubby little apartment in San Francisco.

Squaring my shoulders, I let myself back into the studio. I climbed back into bed and took Alex’s hand in mine. (“This looks serious,” he joked, then stopped smiling as he saw the grim set to my mouth.) As Miranda advised, I confessed first that I hadn’t told him everything that happened that afternoon in LA, and that I’d held back only because I didn’t want to make him even more angry. I told Alex about how Julian had scared me, made me feel for the very first time that I might not be able to trust that he wouldn’t cross a line and put his hands on me. It was a fear that was borne out when Julian forced a kiss on me and when rebuffed, simply tried again.

As I described the circumstances of the kiss, Alex repeatedly clenched and released his fists. “How dare he? How could he even think he had the right to touch you again? Did he believe I would just stand aside for him, as I always had before?” he gritted out. “He’s dead. He’s fucking dead.”

Then came the third-hand, telephone-game version of Julian’s recounting of my visit to his eyrie, how I’d stalked him to trap him, how I connived my way into his apartment, then his arms, then his bed. How I was being exploited by Alex, and how we no longer had any love or passion left. How much I wanted to be back in my old life with my true and only one, Julian. (Alex cycled through grunts of disgust and sharp bursts of laughter as I repeated Julian’s fever dream of what he wished our visit had truly been like.)

And while I was able to speak steadily as I let the truth out of the box I’d kept it trapped in for a week, where it had been snarling at me to be let out, once set free its release made me pitch forward into Alex’s chest. He said nothing at first, just clumsily patted my back as I sobbed.

Finally: “Mel, I’m not like him. Nothing like. You should never hold back the truth from me, even when you think I will be angry or sad or disappointed. Did you think I’d yell at you? Julian is the monster here.” I drew my head from his chest to look up, up at him. “But did you know, sweetest,” he continued, “that I happen to enjoy killing monsters?”

I laughed lightly through my tears, wiped at my runny nose with my sweatshirt arm. “Do you have any need for help from a little princess? I have my own sword these days, sometimes.”

He tucked my head back under his chin. “Keep it sharp, Melissa. We’re going hunting.”