The voice from the toilet stall. Her husband's voice — or the voice she had heard as her husband's voice, the specific, warm register of the man she had woken up beside for four years, saying the specific, precise words about her that had been living at the back of her skull.
'She never understood what a man wanted.'
'She was never enough.'
'Not in that way.'
Her mouth opened.
Closed.
She was on her knees in a car looking at something she had never done in four years of marriage and the specific, small, quiet voice of inferiority was saying: 'he already told you. You already couldn't give your own husband what he needed. You couldn't even do that much.'
He reached forward.
His hand — not grabbing, not forcing. The specific, slow extension of a hand that was offering something. His palm finding the top of her head. The specific, warm, unhurried weight of it.
"Do you trust me?" he said.
She looked up.
The purple eyes in the dark.
