She stood at the bathroom sink, wet tile ringed with plastic bottles and potions and leaking creams and serums I was always begging her to throw out. The light must’ve been buzzing, because the bulb has to be replaced by a specialist, and we’ve been saying we’d ring him every day for five years now.

The air stank of deodorant.

Later she would claim she was purging the small white room from a bee that had crept in through the window she had opened to let the damp out. We had a patch of mould grow on the ceiling last month. She blamed me for taking too-hot showers.

She had turned the minute she sensed me, eyes circled in day old mascara and the rouging of tears. Her voice was not broken enough for it to have been sorrow. I had noticed it before I had even reached her upstairs, the kitchen light shut off and overflowing with dirty glasses all smelling stained with the same medicinal tang. The empty cat bowl, the way Pepper yowled, and the unmistakable stench of burning tar seeping through the walls.

A ball of foil lay in the sink, but her arms were spotted with those tiny red needle-bites that told me there were implements much worse to be found elsewhere.

Her face said: You’re supposed to be in London.

“Meeting got cancelled,” I said. “Lara.”

Lara did not look at me then.

Instead she reached into the sink and crushed the ball of foil into her fist.

"The train strike," she said.

"What?"

"The train strike. I thought you said there was a train strike."

I stared at her. "There isn't."

"Right."

The foil crackled in her hand.

For a moment neither of us moved. The extractor fan rattled overhead, making its usual dying-animal noise. Somewhere downstairs Pepper knocked something over and began meowing as though he had been abandoned for years rather than an afternoon.

"Lara."

She flinched.

"What is this?"

"What is what?" She asked.

"The foil."

She looked at her fist as if she had forgotten it was there.

"Oh."

"Don't."

"I'm not doing anything."

"Don't do that thing where you pretend not to know what I'm talking about."

Her jaw tightened.

The room felt suddenly tiny. The deodorant hung in the air so thick it stung the back of my throat.

I looked at her.

She looked away first.

Finally I said, "How long?"

"What?"

"How long, Lara?"

I had prepared myself for shouting, for some spectacular performance. Instead she just looked tired.

"I don't know."

"Try."

"A few months."

I nodded once. "A few months."

"Yes."

"The new credit card is a few months old."

She said nothing.

"The necklace your grandmother left you disappeared a few months ago."

"Kari—"

"The cash from the kitchen drawer."

"Kari."

"The laptop."

"Stop."

The word cracked out of her.

Outside, rain tapped lightly against the window.

Lara pressed her palms against the edge of the sink and lowered her head.

"I was going to tell you."

I almost laughed again, because that must have been the oldest sentence in the world. People always planned to tell the truth tomorrow.

"I was going to tell you," she repeated.

"When?"

She didn't answer.

"When I found you unconscious?"

Her eyes snapped up. "Has that happened?"

"No."

"Then don't say things like that."

I stared at her. The absurdity of it almost took my breath away, as though there was a proper way to discover your wife had been poisoning herself in secret.

"Kari," she said quietly.

I hated how frightened she sounded.

"Where is it?" I asked.

"What?"

"The rest of it."

Her gaze drifted toward the door. The cold feeling that had been gathering in my stomach hardened into certainty.

There was more.

Much more.