(Caroline's POV)
I look at the ceiling. The plaster has a hairline crack near the light fitting that I've been meaning to mention to someone for weeks. I've been cataloguing small things like that lately — cracks, displaced objects, timestamps, the incremental evidence of things being not quite right. My brain has been running on threat assessment for so long I've forgotten how to turn it off.
"I'm tired," I say.
"Of Helen?"
"Of being betrayed." I say it to the ceiling, not to him, because the ceiling doesn't have eyes that will tell me what the words cost him to hear. "Not of you. I want you to know that first. This isn't about you."
He's quiet. Waiting.
"I loved Samuel," I say. "I wasn't naive about it — I knew he was a certain kind of man, ambitious, image-driven, a rich playboy.
