My face was constantly swollen.

My body had changed.

I had abandoned my career to stay beside Ethan while he recovered from injuries caused by an old accident.

Vanessa, meanwhile, looked like she belonged in a fashion campaign.

Watching her help him stand, I finally understood why her social media had recently been filled with expensive dinners, bouquets, glasses of wine, and photographs taken inside my husband’s office.

On the ride home, Ethan rested his head against my shoulder.

“Did my wife come?” he murmured sleepily.

Once, that question would have softened me.

Then I smelled roses on his jacket.

It wasn’t my perfume.

I moved away.

That night, my mother-in-law, Diane, practically ordered me to make soup for Ethan’s hangover.

“A good wife takes care of her husband.”

While I stirred the soup, my phone vibrated.

Vanessa had posted something new.

“Someone bruised my heart a little tonight. Tomorrow I’ll be fine.”

I smiled.

She thought she was playing a game I didn’t understand.

She was wrong.

When I was seven, I watched my father leave my mother for another woman.

After the divorce, everyone was horrified when I chose to live with him because he had more money.

Nobody understood why.

From inside my father’s home, I could slowly help recover some of what my mother had lost.

I learned very early that crying rarely changes the rules.

Understanding the rules does.

The next morning, Ethan finally noticed the anniversary date on the calendar.

His face went pale.

He apologized over and over, then presented me with an outrageously expensive designer handbag I had barely noticed in a magazine months earlier.