My Husband Faked Mental Illness to Hide His Affair

Anderson called on a Friday, right after six. I was still at the penthouse, standing at the counter with a cutting board and a knife I wasn't using, because Liam had texted that he'd be home for dinner and some old habit in me still set out the tomatoes and the basil like it mattered.

"Georgia posted something," Anderson said. No greeting. That was how I knew it was good.

"What kind of something?"

"A photo. Deleted twenty minutes after she put it up, but not before it cached. A private estate outside London. Stone walls, a hedge maze, the kind of place that doesn't list its rates online." A pause. I heard him typing. "I cross-referenced it with Liam's assistant's travel calendar. Got that through a records request this afternoon. Ten days. They fly out next Tuesday."

I set the knife down. My hand was very steady. I noticed that, the way you notice a stranger's face in a crowd — with a kind of distant curiosity, like it belonged to someone else.

"Ten days," I said.

"A hunting lodge, technically. There's an archery range on the grounds. Georgia mentioned it in the caption before she took it down. 'Learning to shoot, wish me luck.'" He let that sit for a second. "Olivia, if we're going to get him on record, this is the place. No board members. No lawyers hovering. Just him, feeling untouchable."

The basil on the windowsill was gone now — I'd taken it to Sarah's weeks ago — and the empty space where the pots used to sit looked strange to me still, like a missing tooth I kept running my tongue over.

"Book me a flight," I said.

There was a small silence on the other end. Not hesitation. Just him, taking me in.

"Okay," he said. "I'll set it up."

---

The night before I left, Liam had a client dinner. That was what he called it when he texted me at seven — running late, client dinner, don't wait up. I used to wonder about the clients. Now I didn't wonder about anything. I just read the words and set the phone face-down on the counter and felt nothing, which was its own kind of loud.

The penthouse was too quiet without him in it, and too quiet with him in it too, so it didn't make much difference either way anymore. I sat at the kitchen island with a mug of tea I didn't drink and my suitcase already packed and zipped by the door, and I let myself feel, for one full minute, exactly how strange this was. Tomorrow I would fly across an ocean to stand in front of my husband and lie to his face so he would tell me the truth.

I called Anderson at nine.

He picked up on the first ring. "Hey."

"Hey." My voice came out smaller than I meant it to.

"You good?"

"I don't know yet."

We went through it again — the flight, the car from Heathrow, the woman at the estate's front desk who Anderson's contact had already spoken to, the exact hours the archery range was open to guests. He walked me through the wording one more time. *I'm willing to forgive everything if you're just honest with me.* Simple. Soft. A door left open on purpose.

"You don't have to convince him of anything," Anderson said. "You just have to let him talk. He'll want to talk. Men like that always want someone to know how clever they were."

"And if he doesn't take the bait?"

"He will." No arrogance in it. Just certainty, flat and clean, like a fact he'd already tested. "He's spent three years being smarter than you in a room. He's not going to be able to help himself."

I wrapped my free hand around the mug. The tea had gone cold an hour ago. Outside, the city made its usual noise — a siren somewhere far off, a bus sighing at a stop. Ordinary sounds. I found that strange too, that the world kept being ordinary while I sat here rehearsing a lie that might end my marriage for good this time, on paper, in a courtroom, in a way that couldn't be undone by a warm smile at breakfast.

"Anderson."

"I'm here."

"What if I get there and I still feel something. When I see him."

He didn't answer right away. I liked that about him — he never rushed to fill a silence just because it was uncomfortable.

"Then you feel it," he said finally. "And you still do what you came to do. Those aren't opposites, Olivia. You're allowed to grieve the marriage and end it in the same week."

I closed my eyes. Somewhere down the hall, I could hear the elevator chime — Liam, home from his client dinner that wasn't a client dinner. I didn't move. I didn't say anything about it.

"Stay on the phone," I said. "Just for a while."

"Okay."

He didn't ask me if I was sure. He didn't tell me everything would be fine. He just stayed, the small sound of his breathing on the other end, steady as a metronome, while I lay back against my pillow with the phone still pressed to my ear and the lights of the bedroom off and Liam's footsteps moving somewhere on the other side of a door I'd already, quietly, stopped thinking of as ours.

I don't remember falling asleep. I only remember that when I woke, gray light coming thin through the curtains, the phone was still warm against my cheek, and Anderson's voice was already there, low and unhurried, like he'd never stopped talking at all.

"Morning," he said. "Car's coming for you in an hour."

I sat up. Somewhere down the hall, the shower was running. Liam, getting ready for his day, humming something under the water, easy and warm, a man with nothing on his mind at all.

"Okay," I said. "I'm ready."