Gemma flushed. Stupid, nosy woman. “Oh. Well, thank you very much,” she said as if she were talking to a madwoman and she skied off to catch up with Marcus.

That same night Marcus proposed to her in the hotel restaurant. He went down on one knee and produced a diamond ring and all the other diners clapped and cheered and called out “Whoo whoo!” just like in a schmaltzy movie. Gemma followed the script perfectly.

She put one shocked feminine hand to her throat, said, “Yes, of course, yes!” and threw her arms around him.

Sometimes, she thought about leaving him—but she thought about it in an abstract way, the same way that you dream about living an entirely different life. Imagine if I were a princess. Imagine if I were a famous tennis player. Imagine if I weren’t a triplet. Imagine if I were with someone other than Marcus.

Sometimes, just as she was falling asleep, he would whisper to her what he’d do to her if she ever tried to leave him. He whispered so softly it felt like she wasn’t really hearing it, she was thinking it. She lay so rigid that her muscles ached the next day.

The church was packed for the funeral. His parents and brother were distraught. Person after person got up to tell poignant, funny stories about Marcus. Their voices cracked with grief. They ducked their heads, hid their faces.

Cat and Lyn stood on either side of Gemma. They stood so close she could feel the entire lengths of their bodies next to hers.

After the funeral, she resigned from her teaching job and moved in with Maxine for a while. Her mother behaved the way she did whenever they hurt themselves when they were little—extremely crossly. “How did you sleep?” she snapped each morning. “Drink this please!” She didn’t hug her. She just handed her a carrot juice.

Gemma walked for hours and hours around the neighborhood streets. Her favorite time was twilight, when people began switching on lights, with their curtains still undrawn. You could see straight into the bright little cubes of their lives. It fascinated her. The minutiae of their existences. The potted plants on their windowsills. Their furniture. Their pictures. You could hear the sounds of their music, television sets, radios. You could smell their dinners cooking. People called out to one another. “What’s this plastic bag in the fridge?” “What?” “This plastic bag!” “Oh, that.” Once she stood still for five minutes, listening to the soothing sound of someone’s shower running, imagining steam billowing, soap lathering.

She wanted to go into every house, curl up on their sofas, try out their bathtubs.

When she saw the notice asking for an experienced house-sitter it was the first time she’d felt definite about something in years.

She became a drifter through other people’s homes, other people’s jobs, and other people’s lives.

A year later she dated the second of the fourteen boyfriends.

He was a sweet-faced chartered accountant called Hamish. One day after they’d been going out for a few months, they went to the beach. “Wash the sand off your feet, will you?” asked Hamish mildly, before she got in the car.

On the way home, Gemma yawned and said, “You know, Hamish, I don’t really think this is going anywhere, do you?”

Hamish was shocked. He hadn’t seen it coming. He cried when they said good-bye, ducking his face against his shoulder to wipe away his tears on his sweetly uncool checked shirt.

Gemma felt terrible.

But somewhere deep inside of her she felt a tiny hard kernel of pleasure.

CHAPTER 17

It seemed to Cat that she’d been gathering momentum ever since the night of the spaghetti, slipping and sliding, grabbing frantically to save herself. The night of the mobile phone bill was when her fingers finally uncurled from the rockface and she went into freefall.

“You called her on Christmas Day.”

He didn’t look away, didn’t look at the bill she was waving at him. “Yeah, I did. Cat, babe—”

“Please get that gentle expression off your face.”

“O.K.”

“Why did you pretend to be happy about the baby?”

“I didn’t. I was.”

“Don’t patronize me. I don’t want my feelings spared! I want the truth.”

And like an idiot man he took her literally. He didn’t spare her feelings; he beat them to a bloodied pulp.

The thing was, he’d been having doubts, little doubts, sort of niggling feelings for a long time. A year at least.

A year at least? Cat felt her whole world tilt.

He thought maybe it was normal after being married for so long. He just felt, you know, flat. Didn’t she feel that way sometimes?

“I don’t know,” said Cat, because she didn’t know anything anymore.

That night with Angela, even though he hated himself, he also liked himself. For the first time in ages. Angela made him feel good. Sometimes Cat treated him like such a moron.

“We’ve always been so competitive. Sean’s mentioned it. How we were always making little digs at each other.”

As if their marriage was something that happened a long time ago.

“Go on,” said Cat. “It’s all so fascinating.”

She felt as if she’d committed a social gaffe of gigantic proportions. Had their relationship appeared bitchy and cruel to the world instead of sexy and fun? Had Dan been lying beside her each night, separated by an entirely different reality?

“Just go on,” she repeated. He seemed too brightly defined under the kitchen lights.

That week after he told her about Angela was pretty rough. Cat wasn’t talking to him, or else she was screaming at him, and he didn’t get much sleep on the sofa bed. He was exhausted.

So, one day, without really thinking about it, he accidentally rang Angela.

Cat laughed—a contemptuous bark. “Are you telling me that this all happened because you were tired? Because I was giving you a hard time about your little fling, you decided to turn it into a bigger fling?”

“You’re twisting my words again.”

“I am not twisting your f**king words. I am trying to understand you!”

“It’s complicated.”

“So, while we were trotting off each week to fat Annie, you were having an affair?”

“It wasn’t like an affair! Every time it happened I said, O.K. this is it, never again. It was like when we were giving up smoking. I just kept falling off the wagon.”