She left the main bedroom and walked down the tiny corridor to the room that would be for the boys. There was just enough room for two single beds, side by side. She’d get them new quilt covers. Make it look nice. She was breathing hard, trying to imagine their baffled little faces. Oh, God. Could she really do this to them?

Susi thought that Perry would try to get sole custody of the children, but she didn’t know Perry. His anger flared like a blowtorch and then died. (Unlike hers. Celeste was angrier than he was. She held grudges. Perry didn’t hold grudges, but Celeste did. She was awful. She remembered it all. She remembered every single time, every single word.) Susi had insisted that she begin documenting the “abuse,” as she called it. “Write everything down,” she’d said. “Take photographs of your injuries. Keep doctors’ reports. It could be important in any court cases or custody hearings.” “Sure,” Celeste had said, but she had no intention of doing so. How humiliating to see their behavior written down. It would look like they were describing a children’s fight. I snapped at him. He yelled at me. I yelled back. He pushed me. I hit him. I got a bruise. He got a scratch.

“He wouldn’t try to take the children away from me,” Celeste had told Susi. “He’d do what was best for them.”

“He might think it was best for the children to stay with him,” Susi had told Celeste in her cool, matter-of-fact way. “Men like your husband often do go for custody. They have the resources. The money. The contacts. It’s something you need to prepare for. Your in-laws might get involved. Suddenly everyone will have an opinion.”

Her in-laws. Celeste felt a pulse of grief. She’d always loved being part of Perry’s big, extended family. She loved the fact that there were so many of them: random aunties, hordes of cousins, a trio of silver-haired, grumpy great-uncles. She loved the fact that Perry didn’t even need a list when he went duty-free shopping for perfume. Chanel Coco Mademoiselle for Auntie Anita, Issey Miyake for Auntie Evelyn, he’d murmur to himself. She loved seeing Perry throw his arms around a favorite male cousin, tears in his eyes because they hadn’t seen each other for so long. It seemed to prove something essentially good about her husband.

Right from day one, Perry’s family had warmly welcomed Celeste, as if they sensed that her own small, self-effacing family didn’t quite stack up next to theirs, and that they could give her something she’d never had, besides money. Perry and family offered abundance in everything.

When Celeste sat at the big, long table, eating Auntie Anita’s spanakopita, watching Perry chat patiently with the grumpy great-uncles, while the twins ran wild with the other kids, a vision of Perry hitting her would flash in her head, and it would seem impossible, fantastical, absurd, even if it had happened the night before, and along with the disbelief would come shame, because she knew it must somehow be her fault, because this was a good, loving family and she was the outsider, and imagine how appalled they would be to see her hitting and scratching their beloved Perry.

No one in that big, laughing family would ever believe that Perry could be violent, and Celeste had no desire for them to know, because the Perry who bought perfumes for his aunties was not the Perry who lost his temper.

Susi didn’t know Perry. She knew examples and case studies and statistics. She didn’t know that Perry’s temper was only one part of him, it wasn’t all of him. He wasn’t just a man who hit his wife. He was a man who read bedtime stories to his children and put on funny voices, who spoke kindly to waitresses. Perry wasn’t a villain. He was a man who just sometimes behaved very badly.

Other women in this situation were afraid that their husbands would find them and kill them if they tried to leave, but Celeste was afraid she’d miss him. The pure pleasure of seeing the boys run to him when he returned from a trip, watching him drop his bags and get straight down on his knees, arms held wide. “I need to kiss Mummy now,” he’d say.

This was not simple. This was just a very strange marriage.

She walked back through the apartment, ignoring the kitchen. It was small and poky. She didn’t want to think about cooking in that kitchen. The boys whining: I’m hungry! Me too!

Instead she went back into the main bedroom and plugged the lamp into the electrical outlet. The electricity was still on. The colors of the lamp turned rich and vibrant. She sat back and admired it. She loved her funny-looking lamp.

After she moved in she would have Jane and Madeline over to visit. She would show them her lamp and they’d cram onto that tiny balcony and have afternoon tea.

If she left Pirriwee, she’d miss her morning walks around the headland with Jane. For the most part they’d walked in silence. It was like a shared meditation. If Madeline had walked with them, they would have all three talked the whole time, but it was a different dynamic when it was just Jane and Celeste.

Recently, they’d both began to tentatively open up. It was interesting how you could say things when you were walking that you might not otherwise have said with the pressure of eye contact across a table. Celeste thought of the morning when Jane had told her about Ziggy’s biological father, the repulsive man who had more or less raped her. She shuddered.

At least sex with Perry had never been violent, even when it followed violence, even when it was part of their strange, intense game of making up, of forgiving and forgetting. It was always about love, and it was always very, very good. Before she met Perry, she had never felt as powerful an attraction to a man, and she knew she never would again. It wasn’t possible. It was too specific to them.