Part Two: The Man Named Daniel
His name was Daniel Marsh.
Sarah had met him eighteen months earlier at a company training weekend — one of those two-day events at a hotel outside the city, full of group exercises and name tags and bad coffee. He was a project manager from the Bristol office, tall, quiet, with dark eyes that paid attention in a way that made people feel like they mattered.
She had not planned anything. That was the truth she would repeat to herself for months afterward, though she came to understand, slowly and painfully, that not planning does not mean not choosing.
It had started with conversation. Long ones, the kind she and Thomas hadn’t had in years — not because he was a bad man, not because she didn’t love him, but because life had pressed them both into grooves, routines, the efficient choreography of two people managing a house, a child, two jobs, two kinds of exhaustion. They spoke, she and Thomas, but often in the language of logistics. Emma’s dentist appointment is Tuesday. The boiler needs servicing. Did you call your mother back?
With Daniel it was different. He asked her questions nobody had asked in years. What did she want? What did she miss? What did she dream about at night?
She should have stopped it at the conversation.
She didn’t.
That Friday, she had told herself it would be the last time.
She had told herself that before.
Daniel arrived at eleven. She had cleaned the house that morning, which she recognized even as she did it as a strange, guilty kind of ritual — as if a clean house could contain the mess of what she was doing inside it. She had made coffee. She had put on the white sweater because she was cold, and not for any other reason. She had opened the living room curtains because the sunlight was nice, and not to give the impression of a woman with nothing to hide.
They sat on the couch.
They talked for a while.
And then they sat closer.
And then —
The front door opened.
