Page 5 of Pretend You Love Me

My phone buzzes on the cushion beside me. Harper’s name appears on the screen, along with a text: “Just finished the draft of chapter twelve and I’m having a crisis of confidence. Can you read it and tell me if the cheating husband is too much of a cartoon villain? I’m trying to make him human while still making readers want to feed him to wolves.”

I stare at the message, at Harper’s name, at the small heart emoji she’s added at the end. The words swim slightly, then switch back into focus.

I don’t answer her though. I’m not ready to talk about anything, let alone a cheating husband right now.

The house is exactly the same as it was twenty minutes ago. The same toys on the floor, the same laundry waiting to be folded, the same half-finished coffee on the side table. Daniel is in the kitchen, making pasta the way he always does, sauce from a jar but with extra garlic because he knows I like it. Outside, the lawn mower sits silent on the freshly cut grass. In the bassinet by the window, Maisie makes a small, sleepy sound and settles back into dreams.

Nothing has changed. And yet, everything has changed.

I sit perfectly still on the couch, my book open in my lap, and wait for my world to make sense again.

Three

I am standing at the kitchen counter, chopping a banana into pieces so small they’d make a paediatrician proud, when Daniel leans against the fridge and says the car needs a service before winter. I nod, keep my eyes on the knife, and say, “Yeah, probably worth doing,” with the careful warmth of a woman who has not spent the last forty-eight hours lying awake cataloguing how many times her husband has cheated on her.

“Budget’s a bit tight this month with the new tyres,” Daniel continues, taking a sip of coffee from the mug I gave him for our second anniversary, the one that says HUSBAND MATERIAL in cheesy gold letters. “But I can probably move some things around. Maybe skip the gym subscription for a month.”

The knife hits the chopping board with a slightly too forceful thwack.

“Sure,” I say. “Makes sense.”

I’m scarily good at this. This morning, I laughed at his joke about recycling. I asked whether he wanted scrambled or fried eggs with exactly the right amount of spousal warmth. I even remembered to grab his phone charger from the bedroom when he couldn’t find it, handing it over with a small eye roll that contained absolutely none of the bile currently climbing my throat.

The performance is seamless. I should get an award.

Across the kitchen, Milo is strapped into his bouncer, making furious noises at a plastic giraffe that clearly offended him by existing. Normally, I’d cross the room and tell him the giraffe is very sorry for whatever it did. Today, I stay at the counter, watching Daniel from the corner of my eye.

He’s scrolling his phone again, the screen tilted slightly away from me.

It’s not an accident. It’s a habit. My stomach turns, wondering how many signs I missed.

Then Daniel laughs, a short, unguarded sound, the kind he makes when something genuinely catches him off guard. It’s the laugh I fell in love with.

The sound pulls me backward into memory.

We met at a house party in a flat with no furniture and a broken speaker. I was twenty-two, just out of university, starting my first real job at a marketing agency that specialized in making middle-aged men feel good about selling software. Daniel was twenty-four, working as an assistant editor at a local paper, wearing a shirt with a small coffee stain on the collar and the smile that made my stomach flip.

We were standing in the kitchen, pressed into the corner by the crush of bodies, and he was telling me a story about his boss locking himself in the bathroom with an injured pigeon he’d found in the parking lot. The story itself wasn’t even that funny, but the way Daniel told it, with his hands moving, his voice changing to imitate his boss’s increasingly panicked text messages, “Daniel, the pigeon is looking at me with anger. What do I do?,” had me bent double, one hand pressed to my mouth to keep from spraying beer all over his shoes.

I failed. The beer went everywhere, down my chin, onto his shoes, even somehow into my hair. I was mortified, already reaching for a paper towel, but Daniel just looked down at his soaking feet and then back at me, his eyes crinkling at the corners.

“That’s the most impressed I’ve been all night,” he said, and then he was laughing too, the sound bright and warm in the stuffy kitchen. “Most women just laugh at my jokes. You’ve elevated it to an art.”

“Art costs extra,” I told him, and he smiled, a real smile, the kind that reached all the way to his eyes, and said, “I think I can manage that.”

And I thought, in that moment with beer dripping from my hair and a stranger’s shoes ruined on my account: this is a person who knows how to be happy.

The flashback dissolves, leaving me standing at the kitchen counter with a half-chopped banana and a chest that feels too tight to hold my lungs. Across the room, Daniel is still laughing at his phone.

For a second, I’m caught between the man who laughed with me on a stranger’s kitchen floor and the man who messaged another woman while our children were in the NICU, asking her to “take his mind off things.”

I should hate him.

I do hate him.

But grief sits close beside it, heavy and impossible to separate. Grief for the person I thought he was. For the life I thought we were building.

“We need more nappy sacks,” Daniel says, tucking his phone into his back pocket. “The ones with the tie handles, not the drawstrings. Those are rubbish.”