“You’re Ethan’s wife?”

The woman standing in my kitchen went so pale when she said it that for a second I actually wondered if she was the one who’d come home sick.“Yes,” I said. “I’m Mallory.”

Her eyes flicked past me, down the hallway, toward my husband’s home office. Just for a second. Then they came back to my face.

And she whispered one word.

“Finally.”

I’d left work before noon that day. A stomach bug had crept up on me all morning, and by eleven the fluorescent lights over my desk felt like they were drilling straight into my skull. My boss took one look at me and told me to go home before I infected the whole floor. So I did. My only plan in the entire world was to crawl under my duvet and not move until the next day.

Instead, I was standing in my own kitchen, staring at Rosa.

Rosa was the cleaning lady Ethan had hired four months earlier. I knew her name. I knew she came on Wednesdays. But we had never once met, not in four months, because I was always at work when she came, and she was always gone by the time I got home.

Ethan had arranged all of it. The hiring, the schedule, the payment. He’d handled everything, the way he’d started handling so many things.

Let me back up, because you need to understand how grateful I was. You need to understand that so you can understand the rest.

For about a year, my job had been slowly eating me alive. I was leaving the house before seven most mornings and dragging myself back in after six most nights, and then I’d cook dinner, throw in a load of laundry, and answer another hour of emails before bed. I was running on fumes. Everyone could see it. Ethan most of all.
The house was messy. My marriage was uncertain.

And the next decision belonged to me.

That was enough to start with.

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