Page 60 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

‘Okay. So it could be worse?’

‘It could be so much worse. I’d still quite like to knock some sense into that husband of yours.’

‘I know,’ I say, trying not to think about Jack and what’s waiting for me at home.

‘There are also a lot of interview requests, from big podcasts, broadcast media, the usual. But I’m thinking that’s too much of a risk. I think we keep control of all thecontent coming from you both and maybe just lay low for a few days. Agreed?’

‘Agreed.’

When I get home that evening, I close the door behind me, quietly, and Jack doesn’t ask where I’ve been. Maybe he assumes or feels that he doesn’t have the right to ask after what he’s done. I make the mistake of turning my phone back on and see people making videos about the story, posting their theories on all sorts of websites; there are newsletters and blog posts and think pieces. Some girl I knew at Bristol has done a self-indulgent column for one of the papers about how we were pressuring people to stay married. I didn’t expect that from someone I once lent a spare pair of knickers to when she stayed over and slept with my housemate.

A couple of days pass with Jack and I barely speaking to each other. We sit through a painful council of war with Clay, the publishers, PR, and the crisis comms people they ended up hiring even though I don’t think they said anything other than ‘don’t respond to any posts about you’. Everyone keeps saying the same thing – it will go away. People will lose interest. It won’t matter this time next year. But we don’t have a clean slate anymore. We’re not blameless or unassailable. Whenever we get a big brand deal or announce a new book, this is what they’ll comment underneath. We’ve joined the long list of influencers who have a chink in their armour, a top trump that someone else can literally always use to tell us that we’re bad and wrong. And I guess maybe there’s a power in that. I might be able to find some freedom in it, eventually, in the idea that thething I’ve been most afraid of came true and I survived it. If I survive it.

And then it’s time to put a post up from our own accounts. Much like the times we have sex when I’m ovulating even though neither of us really wants to, we’ve got to try and perform something intimate to get the result that we want. It’s all very sexy. I pick a picture of us, on the retreat, sitting next to each other in the snug, both talking to other people. I go through dozens of drafts and eventually settle on something which I think is pretty good. And then I go to Jack’s study, where he’s been hibernating for the last two days, mired in shame, and I knock on the open door. He looks hollowed-out. I know how bad he feels. I’ve barely said anything that I want to say to him because despite the fact that we all know he’s the cause of this problem, I hate seeing him suffer and I absolutely can’t be the person who does that to him.

‘Hey.’

‘Hello,’ he says, sitting upright. ‘All okay?’

We’re back to awkward housemates again; so much for the progress of the retreat. ‘Yeah. Fine. I wrote something. For social.’

‘Oh, great,’ he says. I offer my phone and he takes it, awkwardly, as if he’s worried he’s going to drop it. He reads what I’ve written:

Had a busy week? No, us neither. To be serious, we know that we’ve been at the centre of a bit of drama this week. We’ve said no to the interview requests and we haven’t gone on any podcasts, because we wanted to look at ourselves before we start talkingabout what happened. The piece about us was, at least in places, true. But it wasn’t the whole truth. We have been struggling lately, and maybe we owed it to you guys to be more honest about that. Fertility, work, getting a bit older, it’s all added up. We’re a work in progress, and we need to keep talking about that. Thanks for bearing with us. J&J♥

‘Looks good,’ Jack says, handing the phone back, barely looking at it. This is the man who rewrote the wording on our wedding invitation nine times, the man who personally checked every single credit for every radio show he produced, long after that was below his pay grade.

‘Sure?’

He doesn’t meet my eye. ‘Yep.’

He goes back to his computer screen, where he seems to be reading about some cricketing controversy from the eighteen hundreds.

‘You don’t seem very interested,’ I say.

‘Do you actually want my feedback?’

‘Of course I do. Why else would I have asked?’

‘It’s just a bit more of the same thing, isn’t it? Aren’t people going to see straight through it?’

‘What? It’s me being honest about the fact that we’ve had some struggles and apologising for not being transparent about it.’

‘Okay, well firstly, why do we even need to apologise?’ His face is open, he means this; I cannot believe he is asking this question.

‘Because our management told us to.’

‘But who do we owe this to? These people who follow us for free? Or the people who bought our book, whichhas good advice in it regardless of what we’re doing in our personal life? Like, do people get pissed off with Jane Austen for writing romantic fiction and being a spinster?’

I’m really running out of patience now. ‘Do you want me to post this or not?’

‘You asked if I thought it was a good statement, I told you that I think it’s more of the same toxic positivity bullshit – now you can do what you usually do and post it anyway.’

I blink at him, as if he’s just hit me. Then I go to get my laptop, bring it back and smack it down on his desk. I open it, and find the spreadsheet where I track our finances. I make it as big as I can and then jab my finger at the words on the screen. ‘Mortgage. Insurance. Heating. Electricity. Internet. Socialising. Gym membership. London Library membership. Ten different streaming platforms. The new sofa, the old sofa we’re still paying off. Your credit card from when you were twenty-five. My credit card from when I was twenty-five. Student loan, student loan, student loan for your MA – are you looking at this?’

‘Yes,’ he says, though he’s barely looking at it at all.

‘How do you think we pay for all this?’

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