HIS MISTRESS, MY REVENGE

I am still at the table when morning comes.I did not plan to stay. At some point in the night I told myself I would get up, clear the plates, blow out what was left of the candles, go upstairs and take the blue dress off and lie down like a person with some dignity. I told myself that somewhere around two in the morning and then again around four. I am still here at nine, sitting in the same chair, in the same dress, with the same two plates in front of me and the wax from the candles hardened into flat cold rings on the tablecloth. The wine has been open all night. The food on his plate has dried at the edges and smells of nothing anymore.I look like exactly what I am. A woman who waited.I hear the key in the front door at nine twelve.Damien walks in.He looks good. That is the first thing I notice and I hate that I notice it. Fresh shirt, jacket over one arm, hair neat, like a man coming back from something pleasant rather than a man who did not come home all night. He steps int

I did not sleep that night.I lay in the guest room and listened to them downstairs, his voice and hers, easy and low, the sound of two people completely at home with each other, until the house finally went quiet somewhere past midnight. Then I stared at the ceiling until morning came and did it all over again the next day and the day after that.By the fourth day I had stopped eating properly. I knew that. I just could not make myself care enough to fix it. I would stand in the kitchen and open the fridge and look at everything inside it and close it again. I would make tea and forget to drink it. I moved through the house like something that had lost the instructions for being a person and was improvising badly.That morning Damien left with Vanessa at eight without a word to me.I heard them from the hallway. Her laugh. His keys. The door.I went to the kitchen. I stood at the counter. I filled the kettle.And then the room tilted and I grabbed for the edge and missed and that was

We did not speak for three days after that.Not a word between us. He gave me the two weeks he had promised and I gave him nothing back and we moved around each other in the house like two people who had agreed without saying so to pretend the other did not exist. Then on the third day he appeared in the kitchen doorway while I was making tea and said, without looking up from his phone, that his mother was hosting a family dinner on Saturday and I was expected to attend. Appearances had to be maintained until things were formalised, those were his exact words, and I was still his wife on paper and the Sinclairs did not air their business publicly before they were ready.I said fine.Saturday came. I put on the black dress, the good one I wore to Harold’s sixtieth and to every Sinclair event where I had spent an evening being pleasant and presentable and exactly what was required. I did my hair. I put on the pearl earrings Damien had given me on our second anniversary. I stood in front

He never came that night. Not a knock. Not a footstep. Nothing.I lay in the guest room and listened to the house and somewhere around midnight I stopped listening and just stared at the ceiling and let that truth settle into me the way cold settles into a room when you stop pretending the heat is coming.He was not coming.Morning came gray and quiet and I made myself go downstairs because staying up there felt too much like hiding, and I was done hiding.They were in the sitting room.Damien on the sofa, laptop open, coffee on the table, completely at ease. Vanessa tucked against his side, her hand on his arm, saying something into his ear. He laughed. Low and easy, that private laugh he used when something was just for him. She looked up and saw me at the bottom of the stairs and held my gaze for exactly one second, no guilt in it, nothing, just the steady look of a woman who knew exactly where she stood. Damien did not look up at all.I went to the kitchen and put the kettle on.

Sophia met me at the corner of the street.She had been calling since I left the house and I had not picked up, not because I didn’t want to hear her voice but because I needed those twenty minutes of walking to be mine, just mine, the city loud around me and my bag on my shoulder and my hands in my pockets and my feet moving forward. When she saw me turn the corner she didn’t say anything. She just looked at my face and then she pulled me in, both arms, tight, the way Sophia always held on, like she was trying to transfer something directly through the contact.I let myself lean into it for exactly three seconds.Then I stepped back.“I need somewhere to stay,” I said. “Just for tonight, I just need to think, I can come to yours and–”“Amelia.” She pulled a face. “My sister moved back in last month. Her and the two kids. I have a pullout couch and a six-year-old who wakes up at five a.m. I would give it to you in a heartbeat but you are pregnant and you need sleep and it is not–”“I