From the outside, James looked like the kind of husband women were told to be grateful for. Disciplined. Polished.
Ambitious. He carried himself with the particular ease of a man who had always known how to present himself well — the right clothes, the right opinions, the right amount of attention applied at the right moments. We lived in a large house in Vasant Vihar, and on weekends we had breakfast in Khan Market and drove past India Gate at sunset and talked about our future the way people do when they believe the future belongs to them.
I had believed it belonged to us. When he sat me down and told me his firm was sending him to Toronto, I smiled before he even finished the sentence. “It’s the break I’ve been waiting for,” he said.
“Just two years, Sarah. Then we come back stronger. Invest harder.
Maybe build something that’s really ours.”
Two years apart. Two years of me staying in India, managing our properties in Gurugram and Mumbai, handling our accounts, holding the structure of our life together while he built toward something that would benefit both of us. I trusted him.
Because he was my husband. Because I had loved him for a long time. Because the story he was telling fit perfectly inside the story I believed we were living.
I would learn, later, that the most effective lies are the ones that don’t require you to believe something impossible. They just require you to believe something you already want to be true. Three days before his supposed flight, he came home carrying boxes and winter jackets.
“Getting organized early,” he said, laughing. “Everything in Canada costs a fortune.”
It was plausible. It was exactly what a man preparing for a two-year posting would do.
I was in the kitchen when he went to shower, and I went into the study to find some documents from our family lawyer — nothing urgent, just paperwork I had been meaning to look at. His laptop was open on the desk. I wasn’t looking for anything.
That is the truth, and it matters to me. I wasn’t suspicious in the way that makes you go searching. I was simply in the room, and the screen was visible, and my eyes moved the way eyes do.
The email on the screen was from a leasing agency. Luxury apartment. Gurugram.
Fully furnished. Two-year lease. Registered residents: James and Erica.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
