Page 68 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

On eBay she’s watching a couple of first editions of Jeeves and Wooster books, despite the fact that I’ve already filled most of the shelf space in this house. She’s a fantastic present buyer, constantly on the lookout for the perfect gift for people. Usually if she does spot something brilliant that one of our friends or family will love, she’ll buy it on the spot and then won’t be able to wait until their actual birthday or Christmas, handing it over immediately instead. One of the many things I’ve always teased her for. And loved her for.

Then there’s a parenting forum. She’s been posting in the fertility section. There’s a tab: ‘threads I’ve started’. I tell myself I’m not going to, and then I do it anyway. I want to know her. I want to know what she’s been thinking and feeling and wrestling with. And oh God. She’s started so many threads. So, so many. Asking about symptoms she might be experiencing, asking about supplements, sex positions, dietary improvements, clinics, experimental treatment. ‘My husband isn’t willing to try IVF yet,’ she’s written on one post. ‘What’s wrong with your husband?’ some anonymous poster replied. ‘Does he actually want a baby?’

There’s another post titled ‘D & C – DO I HAVE TO TAKE SOMEONE WITH ME?’ in which she’d posted that she’s having a voluntary D & C, because she’s read that it can improve fertility after a miscarriage. ‘Do I need someone to take me home or will the clinic discharge me?’she’d asked. ‘My husband isn’t able to come with me.’ Even on anonymous forums, she’s lying to preserve a perfect image of us. Or maybe, I find myself thinking, because she’s protecting me.

A nice fellow forum user has explained that she will definitely need someone with her because it’s a brutal experience. I realise that, last night, when she told me that she’d been to hospital with Clay, I gave almost no thought at all to her being in pain, or her having something medical done, only the fact that she went with Clay. Fucking hell. I close the tab because I can’t bring myself to read any more of it.

There, on our profile: 1.1 million followers. Down from the 1.25 we’d reached before I blew everything up and, as Clay’s updates remind me, still falling. @Jack&Jessica. When her account about our relationship started to gain traction, she paid a couple in Texas, who barely posted, to buy the username. It cost her $150 and I thought she was absolutely mad for doing it. Shows how much I know.

Next to the inbox is the ‘settings’ icon. For some reason I click on it and then hover the mouse over ‘delete account’.

All of our problems started with this account; we were happy before. Happy and kind and a team. Weren’t we?

I think back to Jessica’s Sunday night blues, coming out of the shower with an expression of condemned misery, hardly able to talk while we watched TV, insisting on another episode because going to bed meant going to sleep, and going to sleep meant waking up to another week of work. The emails she’d send me in the middle of the afternoon when she’d been talked down to and told off all day, no matter how hard she’d tried. It was years of that.And it got progressively worse with every year she stayed. I remember it would take her weeks to amp herself up to apply for other jobs, and then when she got rejected, because she didn’t have the right experience or there were too many people trying to get into social media and content creation, she’d pretend not to care but it would tear her up. And every rejection meant weeks before she could bring herself to try again. After months of it, she just stopped trying, and my cajoling only made things worse. But everything making us miserable now stems from this account.

While I’m hovering my mouse over the ‘delete’ button, dithering, the little message icon in the corner flashes red. Without thinking about it, I click. It’s a message, in a long thread.

Thanks.It’s a really good point. I think it’s just the stigma of being the first of my friends to split, y’know? Like everyone is going to be saying I’ve failed.

I read the conversation, and see that it goes back several weeks, in dribs and drabs. It’s with a young woman in Kent who is thinking of leaving her husband, who has a gambling addiction. She’s exchanged maybe thirty messages with Jessica, during which Jess has sent charity resources, offered advice, and reassured this girl that leaving her husband is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. And now I can’t stop myself – I open the inbox and I scroll down. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of conversations.

Young women, older women, young men, middle-aged men, people in same-sex relationships, people with kids,people with fertility issues. Every one of them is asking Jessica’s advice and she has replied to literally every single one. It can’t have been easy, carrying all that emotional baggage for other people, listening to them talking about their horrors when she was having her own private ones. But her responses are brilliant and well considered. The advice is thoughtful, and reasoned and kind; it’s even funny in places. Where there are suggestions of abuse, she’s firmly directed people to the police, and in some cases it looks like she’s even helped a couple of people to extricate themselves from horrible relationships. Time after time they apologise for not buying the book, or not being able to afford the book, and either she gives them advice anyway or she offers to post them a copy. She solves spats, advises on rifts, even sometimes helps out with things which have no bearing on marriage. I don’t know how long I’m reading for; my back is aching by the time I look up from the bright white screen, into the darkness of the room around me, realising that I have catastrophically misjudged my wife.

The box room, the one I occasionally allow myself to fantasise about wallpapering with dinosaur paper, is home to all the free stuff we get sent, which Jessica clears out once a month by dropping a load of boxes at the refuge and the food bank. She hasn’t done it for a while, so the products are piling up, and I know that somewhere in here I’ll find what I need. Eventually I find a nice-looking notepad with a pale blue cover. I grab a Sharpie and I write ‘RULES’ on the front. Then I take a picture. Jessica makes this look easy, taking nice pictures. It’s surprisingly difficult. But once I’ve got something passable, I open a draft post. Then I take a deep breath and start to type.

Jessica

I wake up, head on a crisp white pillow, to the feeling of a small child’s soft hand stroking my cheek.

‘Do you think she’s dead?’ Ada whispers.

‘Probably,’ Raffy says. I rush to sit up and open my eyes because I have a feeling I know how he’s going to check whether I’m alive or not, but it’s too late, and Raffy flings his entire body weight, which is quite a lot even though he’s an average-sized five-year-old, at my sternum.

‘Woah!’ I yelp, sitting up.

‘Yay!’ Ada shouts. ‘Not dead!’

After we throw some pillows around for a bit, and I’ve dodged Raffy’s question about what death really means (because I can’t remember what Tom and Grace decided about their kids and the topic of mortality), we go downstairs. Grace is standing at the kitchen counter in her leggings and a jumper which says HOT MAMA on the front.

‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘I would have stopped them coming into your room, but when they’re harassing you, they leave me alone, so ...’ This is the most candid thing she’s ever said to me, and I assume I’ve earned it by turning up tear-stained on her doorstep after the row with Jack last night.

‘Not a problem,’ I say. ‘We had fun.’

Grace makes me a cup of coffee and we sit at her huge kitchen table. Some of the records, which were mounted in brackets on the walls, displaying their sleeves, have gone. The paint is a little darker in the squares they used to occupy, where the sun hasn’t bleached it. I assume Tom has taken them to his new place. I feel a pull in my chest at theidea of him unpacking and putting things he loves on new walls. Another for Grace, who has to look at those empty squares every day.

‘So what happened?’ she asks. And it’s a fair question. When I turned up last night, I was too sad to talk, and I knew she’d give me a bit of space, but she’s a lawyer, she wants answers, and she’ll get them out of me whether I like it or not.

After I left the house last night, I walked to the end of the street, once again hoping that Jack was going to follow me. He didn’t, and so I opened my phone and started to call a taxi before realising that I didn’t know where I’d be calling it to. Last time I went to Clay’s, and I could have done that again. But it felt like if I did that, if I went to see the person we'd – in part – been arguing about, I’d be picking a side. And I didn’t want that. I considered my dad’s place, and yes, I could totally have gone there. It’s not like he’d turn me away. But I reasoned that he’d want to know what was going on, and as he’s been looking for a reason to dislike Jack since we met, this would provide exactly that. Maybe, I tell myself with a little twinge of hope, it’s a good sign that I don’t want to tell my dad about all this, that I want him to still approve of Jack. That I don’t want this to be the end of us. I started to look for a hotel on the basis that paying for somewhere to stay would unquestionably be the best and most sensible thing to do, but the thought of it made me feel so achingly alone. So, I swallowed the pride which I had let get in the way of my friendships, and I dialled Grace’s number.

‘Get in a taxi,’ she said, before I’d even finished my sentence.

And now we’re sitting in her kitchen, drinking massive oat milk cappuccinos while her kids destroy the playroom, and I notice the rude nakedness of her left hand, from which her massive diamond wedding band, and even more massive diamond engagement ring, are conspicuously missing.

I tell her everything. About the fertility stuff, the Clay stuff, the American deal, the whole horrible, sticky mess. And eventually, once I’ve finished projectile talking at her, she considers me for a moment, and then asks, ‘Do you think he’s being unreasonable?’

I sigh. ‘I don’t know. It would be easier if I could say which one of us was capital W wrong. I know this isn’t exactly what he wants to be doing, but it’s setting us up for life. Once we’ve got a decent dent in the mortgage and some savings, and all our debt is paid off, he can write clever books all day long.’

‘Have you told him that?’ Grace asks. I shake my head.

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