Mrs. Lune

A year before she became the most hated woman in Plyth Valley County, Bella Lune woke up at 5:47 AM, thirteen minutes before her alarm, and held still so she wouldn’t wake her husband.

Richard slept like a man with no guilt—flat on his back, mouth slightly open, one arm flung across her side of the bed like he was claiming territory even in his sleep. He snored in a low, rhythmic drone that Bella had once found endearing and now found roughly equivalent to living beside a malfunctioning appliance. She stared at the ceiling for exactly ninety seconds, then slid out from under the duvet with the practiced stealth of someone who’d been doing this for years.

The bathroom was her staging ground. She showered, dried her hair with the diffuser attachment—volume but not effort, that was the trick—and applied makeup in a way that made it look like she wasn’t wearing any. Tinted moisturizer, one coat of mascara, a lip balm that cost forty-two dollars and tasted like nothing. She studied herself in the mirror. Forty years old. Still beautiful. She knew this the way she knew her blood type—it was a fact, not a feeling. Beauty had been useful. It had opened doors, attracted Richard, furnished a life. But lately it felt like armor she couldn’t take off, even when she was alone.

She pulled on a cream cashmere sweater and fitted jeans—casual, effortless, an outfit that took exactly twenty-seven minutes to select—and went downstairs to start breakfast.

By the time Richard appeared in the kitchen at 7:15, there was a vegetable omelet on his plate, coffee in his mug, and the Wall Street Journal folded beside his fork. Bella was seated across from him with a smoothie she didn’t particularly want, smiling a smile she’d assembled somewhere between the staircase and the stove.

“Morning, Bells.”

“Morning.”

He kissed the top of her head on the way to his chair. It was a fine kiss. Routine. The kind of kiss you give a lamp you’re fond of.

Richard sat down, unfolded the Journal, and began to eat. He chewed with his mouth slightly open—not enough for anyone else to notice, but enough that Bella could hear the wet rhythm of it from across the island. She’d mentioned it once, maybe five years ago, and he’d looked at her like she’d told him the earth was flat. He didn’t hear it. She heard nothing else.

“So the London trip is confirmed,” he said between bites, not looking up from the paper. “Three weeks. Maybe a little longer depending on how the Barclays thing shakes out. I’ll fly out Sunday.”

Bella felt her shoulders drop half an inch. She caught it, corrected it, took a sip of her smoothie.

“Three weeks,” she said. “That’s a long one.”

“It is what it is. This deal could be huge for us.” Us. As though she had any stake in a derivatives restructuring or whatever the hell it was. As though “us” meant anything beyond the joint checking account and the shared surname. “You’ll be fine, though. You’ve got your book club, your tennis, your—” He waved vaguely, the way he always did when listing her life. Like it was a collection of hobbies he’d approved. “Keep yourself busy.”

“I always do.”

He looked up. Gave her a quick once-over—not sexual, more like an appraisal. “You look great, by the way. Have you been going to the gym?”

There it was. Packed inside a compliment like a razor inside a candy bar. Have you been going to the gym. Not you look great, full stop. You look great, with the implication that she hadn’t looked great before, or that maintenance was expected, or that her body was another asset in the portfolio and he was checking the returns.

“Every morning,” she said.

“Good.” He turned back to the Journal. “You should try that spin class Camille’s been doing. She looks fantastic.”

Bella smiled. It was a beautiful smile. It meant absolutely nothing.

* * *

The Plyth Valley Country Club sat on a hill overlooking a golf course that had been designed, at significant expense, to look like it hadn’t been designed at all. The dining room had leather chairs, white tablecloths, and a sort of hushed atmosphere that suggested money didn’t just talk here—it whispered.

The Lunes had dinner that evening with Dean and Camille Langley. Dean was in private equity, which as far as Bella could tell meant he moved other people’s money around and took a percentage for the inconvenience. Camille was blonde, polished, and competitive in the way that only women who had nothing to compete for could be—she tracked every other wife’s outfit, vacation, and kitchen renovation with the focus of an intelligence analyst.

Bella played her role. She laughed at Dean’s jokes. She complimented Camille’s new highlights. She touched Richard’s arm at the right moments, leaned into him when he told the story about the Singapore deal, and made sure her smile reached her eyes whenever anyone at a neighboring table glanced their way.

She was, by any observable measure, the perfect wife.

Richard loved her in public. That was the thing. At the country club, at galas, at dinner parties—he was attentive, proud, proprietary in a way that might have been flattering if it didn’t feel so much like ownership. He kept his hand on the small of her back. He introduced her as “my beautiful wife” with the practiced warmth of a man presenting a painting he’d acquired at auction. He beamed when other men looked at her, because the looking confirmed what he already knew: he had the best thing in the room.

At home, though, the hand came off her back. The beam powered down. Richard Lune was a man who’d married a woman the way he’d bought the estate—because it was the appropriate thing to acquire at that stage of life—and once the acquisition was complete, he’d moved on to the next deal.

Bella knew this. She’d known it for years. She just hadn’t decided what to do about it yet.

On the drive home, Richard talked about Barclays. Bella looked out the window and counted streetlights.

* * *

He wanted sex that night.

Bella could always tell. There was a sequence: the extra glass of scotch after dinner, the lingering in the bathroom, the way he’d come to bed in just his boxers instead of the full pajama set—like a flag being raised. Tonight he’d done all three, and when he slid under the covers and placed his hand on her hip, she knew exactly what was coming.

“Hey,” he said. Low voice. His version of seductive.

“Hey.”

He kissed her neck. She tilted her head to give him access—reflex, same as driving a familiar route. His hand moved from her hip to her waist, up to her breast, and she made a small sound that she’d learned, over eight years of marriage, was the sound he wanted to hear. Encouraging. Receptive. Not too loud. Richard didn’t like loud.

He climbed on top of her. She opened her legs. He pushed inside with the efficiency of a man catching a train, and Bella closed her eyes and let her body do what it had been trained to do.

She arched when he expected her to arch. She gripped his shoulders when the rhythm picked up. She whispered his name once—just once, breathy, right against his ear—because that was the thing that made him feel like a god, and a man who felt like a god finished faster.

While he moved above her, Bella’s mind drifted. She needed to call the landscaper about the hedges along the south wall. The pool filter had been making a noise. She was out of the forty-two-dollar lip balm. Had she RSVP’d to the Hendersons’ thing on Saturday? She hadn’t. She should do that tomorrow.

Richard’s breathing changed. She recognized the pattern—short, sharp, his grip tightening on the pillow beside her head—and she timed her performance to match. A gasp. A moan. A slight lift of her hips that suggested something she absolutely was not feeling, and then he shuddered, buried his face in her neck, and went still.

Seven minutes. Maybe eight. She didn’t time it, but she didn’t have to. It was always seven or eight.

“That was amazing,” he breathed. He kissed her forehead—the lamp kiss again—and rolled off. Within two minutes, his breathing had evened into that familiar low drone. Within three, he was asleep.

Bella lay in the dark.

The sheets smelled like his cologne—something woody and expensive that she’d bought him three Christmases ago and now couldn’t stand. His arm was slung across her waist again, heavy, pinning her in place. The ceiling fan turned in slow circles above her, and she tracked one blade around and around and around until the repetition blurred and her mind went quiet.

She tried to remember. Actively tried, the way you try to recall a word that’s on the tip of your tongue. When was the last time she’d actually felt something with him? Not performed. Not reciprocated. Felt. The last time his touch had made her breath catch for real. The last time she’d wanted him—not because he expected it, not because it was Tuesday or because he’d taken her to dinner, but because her body had looked at his body and thought yes.

She couldn’t find it. She scrolled backward through months, then years, and came up empty. There was no moment. There was no last time that she could point to and say: that. That was the end of it. The love hadn’t died in a fight or a betrayal or a single devastating evening. It had simply thinned, like fabric washed too many times, until one day she held it up to the light and realized she could see straight through it.

Two years. At least two years since she’d felt anything real for the man lying beside her. Maybe longer. Maybe much longer.

And the terrifying part—the part that kept her staring at that ceiling fan long after midnight—wasn’t the lovelessness. She could live with lovelessness. She’d been living with it.

The terrifying part was how easy the pretending had become. How seamlessly she slipped into the role every morning—the smile, the omelet, the cashmere, the sounds in the dark. How little effort it took to be Mrs. Lune. How automatic the whole performance was, like a machine that ran whether or not anyone was inside it.

Richard shifted in his sleep. His arm tightened across her waist.

Bella didn’t move. She stared at the ceiling and listened to him snore and thought: I could do this for the rest of my life. I could do this perfectly, and no one would ever know.

The thought should have been comforting.

It wasn’t.