“Mrs. Whitaker,” Detective Moreno said gently. “Did your husband explain why he believed that?”
Vanessa looked at Mark.
Mark looked at the floor.
“He said he’d been reading about it for a long time,” Vanessa said. “He said he had a plan. He said, ‘Diane always folds. She’ll want it to be over, and she’ll pay us to leave.’”
The kitchen went silent.
Diane always folds.
Twenty-seven years of my life, summarized in three words by the man who’d lived them with me.
I waited for the old feeling to come. The shame. The flush of embarrassment. The instinct to explain, to defend, to make it sound less true than it was.
It didn’t come.
Instead, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a very long time.
I felt steady.
Because he was right. For twenty-seven years, I had folded. I’d folded when he forgot our anniversary. I’d folded when he spent our vacation savings on the boat. I’d folded when he told my children I was “too sensitive” and I let them believe it. I’d folded so many times that he’d built an entire plan around the certainty that I would fold one more time.
