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SIX FOUR YEARS EARLIER

I look at my wife across the breakfast table.

She looks tired. She’s been looking tired a lot recently.

It’s probably my fault, but there’s not a lot I can do about that.

She was forty-four when I met her, a youthful forty-four.

She’s forty-eight now but looks closer to midfifties.

She’s put on a few pounds, keeps going on about “perimenopause” when she’s ten years younger than Jennifer Aniston, who doesn’t appear to have any problem keeping herself in shape.

I want to tell her to put less butter on her toast, but I can’t because that would be unpleasant, and I am a very pleasant man and a very good husband.

“You look like you could do with a holiday,” I say.

She glances up at me, her tired eyes suddenly bright. But then they dull again. “We can’t afford a holiday,” she says. “You know that.”

“Well, what if I told you that I’d had a bit of a windfall.” I put it out there with a flourish.

“You have?”

“Yes, just a few hundred. Money I lent a friend a couple of years ago, they finally paid me back.”

“A friend?”

“Yes. Peter Tovey. Remember I told you? He needed it to keep his child at that special school?” There is of course no such person as Peter Tovey and this never happened. But what difference does it make?

She shakes her head vaguely. “No,” she says. “I don’t think I remember. But that’s good, then. I mean, maybe we should put it toward one of the loans instead, though. A holiday would be nice, but the overdraft could really—”

I cut her off by reaching across the table and grabbing both her hands, smiling up at her with the brightest, warmest smile I can muster. “Darling, come on, look at you. You’re exhausted. You need this. I’ll book us something. Leave it with me.”

I slide the box across the kitchen counter the following day. It’s sky blue, her favorite color, and tied up with a silk ribbon. She looks at me, her tired eyes filled with curiosity and anticipation.

“I hope you haven’t done anything silly,” she says.

“Might have,” I reply, and rock back on my heels, eye her with affection. “Go on.”

She slips the lid off the box and there it is, the printout from the internet for the weekend in Lille I’ve bought for us, which includes an eight-course tasting dinner and travel on the Eurostar.

“It’s a Wowcher thing,” I say. “We can use it any time before December thirty-first. So, shall we get our diaries out? Find a date?”

It only cost a couple of hundred per person, and she’s paying for it, of course, even though she doesn’t know that.

I used the money she transferred into my account last month to put into our fictional pensions.

But it’s the thought that counts and the expensive gift box is all part of the illusion.

A basic husband would just have forwarded the email, but a top-notch husband, the sort of husband a woman yearns for, prints it off and puts it in a box in her favorite color, presents it with a soft smile, and suddenly it’s more than just a cheap Wowcher deal, it’s a display of love and adoration.

She opens up her phone and beams at me, then scrolls through to her calendar app. “How about June?” she says. “Maybe the middle? The seventeenth?”

I pull out my own phone, find my diary, and scroll to 17 June, and of course there’s nothing there because my life doesn’t work like that, it doesn’t have markers and delineations, it doesn’t hang on dates and plans, it just hurls itself at me in disjointed chunks that I have to somehow knit together into something that looks like normality, and it’s why I work so hard to maintain my charming exterior, because my interior is a chaotic hellscape beyond anyone’s possible imaginings.

“Yes,” I say, typing it into my phone, nodding, pretending to sound organized. “Yes. Perfect. Leave it with me. I’ll book it tomorrow.”

I kiss her on her cheek, breathe in and then quickly out again to expel the slightly sour, slightly salty smell of her skin, that end-of-day, officey smell that she sometimes has.

“You go and have a shower,” I say. “I’ll do dinner.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Go. It’ll be on the table in half an hour.”

I kiss her again and smile at her, tenderly, softly, so genuinely that I can almost make myself believe that I adore her.

Then I turn and pull some garlic from the fridge, put it on a board, find a sharp knife, and hum something French under my breath as I cut it into thin, thin slices.