Page 54 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

I step down the three stairs I’ve taken, still standing on the bottom stair, and wrap my arms around his neck. ‘Thank you for telling me that,’ I say. ‘It really helps.’

‘I wish I knew how to do more,’ he replies.

‘That was what you wanted to talk about? Right? You’d clocked that I’d got my period.’

He nods and buries his face into my neck.

Jack

When we first met, I was the early riser and Jessica loved a lie-in. I grew up in a puritan household where cold rooms and plain food were regarded as good, and things that teenagers enjoy, like lie-ins and PlayStation, were regarded as akin to smoking crack. Not that my parents would know what crack was. I would wake up at 9 a.m. and be drenched with guilt about having wasted half the day, despite the fact that obviously half the day hadn’t actually elapsed.

Back when we were young and stupid and fun and would stay up until three in the morning, I would always envy Jessica’s ability to fester in bed until long past noon and then wake up perky and refreshed, while I’d have forced myself into clothes, gone for a walk, bought anewspaper and spent the entire day pretending that I felt absolutely fine. At some point in our thirties, things shifted. She started getting up early and then, to everyone’s horror, became an I Got Up Early person. She started telling me in great detail how much she loved getting up early, how much she was getting done, how peaceful the world is at 6.30 a.m. and how empty her spin class was. I realised that I used to preach much the same thing to her eye-rolls, I just didn’t know how annoying it was. All of which is to say that when I got out of the shower on Wednesday morning, two days after we got home from the retreat, I wasn’t worried that there was no sign of Jessica. In fact, I wasn’t even worried when I went downstairs and there was no trace of her. I noted that there wasn’t her usual bowl of berries and granola half eaten on the side, because she likes to have half her breakfast when she wakes up for some complicated reason pertaining to insulin. But, it’s Jessica. She’ll probably have read an article about going out for a walk before breakfast improving your nail strength or something. I pottered around, made coffee, and then took my phone off airplane mode.

Usually there’s a little row of notifications – various social media platforms, an email or two, a couple of messages from friends if I’m lucky and they’ve finally replied to me because they’ve had five minutes not chasing their toddler. But today when I pick up my phone, they don’t stop coming. I stand, confused, watching as notification after notification flashes up on my screen.

Are you okay?says a message from my friend Chris, who I worked with at the BBC.

What’s going on?reads the one in our WhatsApp group with Tom and Grace.

I have seven missed calls, one of which is from Clay, and one of which is from my parents’ landline. Four voicemails. I can’t even remember the last time someone left me a voicemail. Social media notifications keep coming and coming and coming, so quickly that I can’t work out which one to press. Something is very wrong.

By reflex, I go to call Jessica. Her phone goes straight to voicemail. I try it again and the same thing happens. I’m not sure what I think is going to happen when I try it a third time, but the panic is really rising now. Why would she have disappeared? And then I start thinking horrible things, about how low she seemed about getting her period, and more dejected than I’ve ever seen her before. I never know what to say when it happens, how to tell her that I’m sorry for once again letting her down and that I really truly believe that we will get there, but that maybe all the workouts and supplements and tracking might be making it harder, that the line we hate about ‘just relaxing’ and ‘enjoying the trying’ might be right. But she was in a state. What if she went out for a walk and something awful happened to her? Is this what would happen if something had happened? Would my parents and Clay know first? I look at the clock on the wall, it’s just after nine. She could have gone out at what, six? Three and a bit hours. A lot of things could have happened to her in three and a bit hours. I call her again, my heart thumping cartoon-like in my chest, my breathing fast. Everything feels tight and terrifying, but as I dial her one more time, the front door opens.

Jessica storms in, carrying a pile of newspapers. She’s on the phone, via her headphones, and she’s still wearing her pyjamas with a coat over them, and sheepskin slippers on her feet. She pulls the sunglasses away from her face and throws a paper down on the kitchen table.

‘I’ve got to go,’ she says. ‘Jack’s up. I’ll call you when we know exactly how bad it’s going to get.’

I go to hug her. ‘Jesus Christ, Jess, the one time you don’t pick up your phone – I was terrified, I thought something really bad had happened to you.’

‘What?’ she snaps, gives me a bemused, angry, icy look, a look I’ve never seen before. It’s pretty jarring for someone you’ve spent your entire adult life with to suddenly have a new facial expression. ‘What are you talking about?’ she asks, as if I’m the one who’s acting strangely.

‘I was calling and calling. I’ve got all these messages, I thought something was wrong.’

‘You haven’t seen it?’

‘What? I haven’t seen what?’ And the panic that I thought had subsided hits me in another wave again.

Grimly, she sits down at the kitchen table and opens the newspaper. Not our usual newspaper, but a lurid tabloid that neither of us would ever buy. I’m aGuardianperson, and Jess doesn’t really read anything, but would pick theTimesfor the aesthetic if she was buying one at the weekend. She opens it, leafing page after page until she stops. And there, on a double-page spread, in big black block letters, is the headline.

SEVEN RULES FOR A PERFECT SHAM-IDGE

‘I’ve already read the online version,’ she says, horribly calm. ‘But it’s longer in print.’

‘What is this?’ I’m staring at the pages but I can’t make them make sense.

‘It’s an article,’ she tells me. There’s still an unnerving tone to her voice. ‘About how our entire marriage – and, by extension, our entire brand – is a sham.’

I have a horrible, terrible, fucking terrifying feeling that I know what’s coming.

‘How? Why?’

Jessica gets up and starts very precisely making a coffee with the several-thousand-pound coffee machine I was sure we didn’t need. ‘Read it.’

‘Hot stuff social media duo Jack and Jessica Rhodes present the impression of having a marriage so perfect that they can tell you how to improve yours,’I read.‘But the truth below the surface is a bit different. Over the weekend, they hosted a retreat at 1.5-million-pound Winchlowe Hall in North Yorkshire, where four couples came to learn about their secrets for a harmonious marriage. But in a shocking turn of events, one workshop attendee told us that behind closed doors, Jack and Jessica’s own marriage is far from ideal.’

‘Oh Jess,’ I say, pausing. ‘Are you okay?’ I go to hug her but she steps backwards.

‘Keep reading,’ she demands, her gaze fixed in the middle distance.

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