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So whose was it? She pocketed the lipstick and got out the car. In her office, she placed it beside her computer screen, where she could keep an eye on it while she worked in case it happened to metamorphose into… into what? A nuclear warhead? A range of diaphanous underwear complete with stray pubic hairs? Both were about as likely, she felt, as her husband having an affair. He wasn’t the type. And she wasn’t the type to be suspicious… Except now, when suspicious was exactly what she was, and evidence of that suspicion lay in the fact she ended up spending half an hour staring at the lipstick instead of doing whatever it was she was supposed to be doing. What about the day the previous week when her husband had been late home from …show more content…

That would be fine, her husband told her. The following morning, busy keeping one eye on the kids, who perhaps because of the return of their father seemed even more boisterous than usual, Jacqui sat in the passenger seat as her husband drove his children to school and then dropped his wife off at her office and then, though obviously she was no longer sitting in the passenger seat, drove himself to his own office. Jacqui had kept her other eye, the one that wasn’t minding the children, on her husband, watching him for any sign that he might have either noticed or been looking for the lipstick. And once he had dropped the children off, she kept one eye on the lipstick and the other on her husband. Nothing about his body language betrayed any trace of nervousness or guilt, but even so, Jacqui was far from certain she had been mistaken to automatically assume the worst. She spent much of the day contemplating whether the time had come to get one of those divorces she’d heard so much about. Most of her friends had had one, so was it not now her turn to indulge? For his part, Jacqui’s husband spent much of the day wondering how he was going to dig his way out of the latest

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