Chapter 2

Over the next two weeks, Ivy didn't show up in my house again.

However, she started appearing in every sentence Julian spoke.

"Ivy said that new cafe is pretty good."

"Ivy almost used salt instead of sugar today."

"Ivy thinks our kitchen window is really lovely."

At first, I just listened quietly.

I told myself that the dinner had made me paranoid.

Julian was naturally good at making friends. He was warm, chatty, and eager to help newcomers who had just moved to the city. Those were the exact qualities that made me fall for him in the first place.

But gradually, I noticed that his voice sounded different whenever he mentioned Ivy.

It was light, filled with a subtle sense of anticipation.

In the past, when he came home from work, he would stand by the kitchen doorway and tell me what happened at the community center.

Which kid splashed paint on the wall, which senior snuck wine into the dance class, which coworker forgot to lock the storage room again.

Now, those stories always featured Ivy.

She would drop off coffee for him during lunch breaks, send photos asking which herbs to buy, or call him for help because she burned a loaf of bread.

And my husband always had time to answer.

On a Wednesday evening, I walked into the living room carrying two plates of pasta, only to find Julian staring down at his phone. His shoulders were shaking lightly with laughter.

"What's so funny?"

He instinctively turned off the screen.

The motion was swift, fast enough to look like pure reflex.

"Ivy sent a photo. She managed to bake her bread into a brick."

He turned the screen back on and handed the phone over to me.

Next to a charred lump of bread, Ivy was showing half of her dismayed face.

I didn't know what was supposed to be funny, so I just handed the phone back to him.

"Do you two talk every day?"

Julian looked up. "Not every day."

Right on cue, the phone buzzed.

Ivy's name lit up the screen.

We both saw it at the same time.

Julian frowned, as if I were the one causing an awkward scene. "She's just asking me about cooking."

"At ten-thirty at night?"

"She probably didn't notice the time."

"What about you? Didn't you notice either?"

He leaned back into the sofa and let out a long sigh. "Maren, can we please not do this again?"

Hearing him say "do this again" squeezed my chest like a vise. It felt as if the kitchen incident had already been proven to be my fault, and now I was about to make the exact same mistake.

I sat down across from him.

"I'm not saying you can't have female friends. I just feel like she's taking up too much space between us."

Julian went silent for a few seconds, then let out a laugh.

It wasn't because he found it funny, but because he found it absurd.

"What space? She sends me a few messages, and suddenly she's stolen your place?"

"I didn't say she stole my place."

"Well, that's what you think." He glared at me. "You think every woman who comes near me is a threat."

That wasn't fair.

In our five years of marriage, I had never checked his phone, nor had I ever interfered with his social life.

When he had lunch with female colleagues or celebrated a female friend's birthday, I would even remind him to pick out a gift.

Yet when I tried to explain this, Julian had already picked up his plate and headed toward the kitchen.

"Why can't you just admit that this makes me uncomfortable?" I asked.

His footsteps paused briefly, but he didn't turn around.

"Because your discomfort doesn't mean I did anything wrong."

That night, he slept with his back turned to me.

I listened to his breathing grow steady, while the phone on the nightstand lit up once more in the dark.

The faint glow fell across his face, illuminating the name I had already grown far too familiar with.

Ivy.

Julian opened his eyes.

Believing I was fast asleep, he picked up the phone and quietly dimmed the brightness.

A few seconds later, I heard him let out an exceptionally soft chuckle.

It was a sound I hadn't received from him all evening.