My eyes went, but not the way they had been going all day.
I had spent two years loving a man who had been studying me like an investment.
I had sat through that woman’s little comments at family dinners — about my job, about my shoes, about whether I would want to keep working — and listened to him tell me afterwards, in the car, to be patient, because she didn’t mean anything by it.
She meant all of it. She had meant it in a specific direction, for two years, with a date in mind.
Before she went out, Lorna stopped at the mirror and fixed something about her hair.
She said: remember. No weakness from the start.
She said: let her know who makes the decisions in that house.
The door opened and closed.
I stayed under there for a long time, looking at the hem of my own wedding dress about four inches from my face.
Then I reached into my clutch and took out my phone.
The recording app was still running. Eleven minutes and forty seconds.
I had started it before I hid, because I thought I might want to keep his reaction to my stupid prank and play it at an anniversary.
It had got every single word instead.
When I finally crawled out, my dress was grey with dust down one side and the veil had a tear in it.
I stood in front of that mirror and wiped my face and something in me went very calm and has largely stayed that way since.
My name is Maris and I am thirty-one and until about eleven twenty that night I would have told you I was the luckiest woman at that wedding.
The thing I have not been able to explain to anybody is the four seconds before the lighter.
Because for those four seconds I was still planning to come out.
I was going to wait for her to leave and then get back under and do it properly when he came up. I had it worked out.
It is the smoke that stopped me. Not the words — the smoke, because it meant she was settling in, and because it meant he had lied about something small and pointless for no reason at all.
