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  “But . . . Damon Blundy attacked you week after week, in his column,” said Simon. “Didn’t that hurt?”

  “Ah.” Paula closed her eyes for a few seconds. “Yes, it did. But you see, with Damon things moved in the opposite direction, the best direction, always. He hurt me first, before he knew me. Then he met me and fell in love with me and . . . well, to use my colors metaphor again, it went from black to gold. For him, it was like that too—I loathed him and then I forgave him: black to gold. And so . . . we did it over and over again: savaged each other publicly, as hurtfully as we could, then made up for it later in private. When the person you love cures the pain they caused by being as loving as they were hateful, it’s an incredible high. The love wouldn’t be anywhere near as powerful if it weren’t the longed-for antidote to the hate. Like having a can of Coke after a long and thirsty game of tennis. Tastes better than any other can of Coke you’ve ever had. Marriage, by contrast, is like starting with a fizzy can of Coke and waiting around while it gets flatter and flatter.”

  Simon nodded. Romantic sadism. An intimate, intense agony that only the loved one could take away. Ought he to worry about how easily he understood it, how little Paula’s explanation fazed him?

  “So what were the criteria?” he asked. “For . . . spouses?”

  “Oh yes, the good-deed part of our plan,” said Paula.

  Good deed? Simon waited. It struck him as unlikely that Paula and Damon Blundy’s conspiracy would have an altruistic strand to it, but he decided to keep an open mind.

  “It was vitally important to me that we didn’t just use people. Damon, of course, said, ‘Great, I’ll grab a bimbo waitress at the Groucho and propose to her.’” Paula rolled her eyes in mock despair. “I said, ‘No. You’ll find an intelligent, unattractive woman whom you can love and respect as a person. And you will love and respect her—not in the way you love me, not a grand passion, but in a married way. The best that a marriage can be—that’s what I want you to make with whichever woman you choose, so bloody well choose someone who you think deserves it.’ This is going to sound weird and spiritual—I am, in fact, a bit spiritual, though I keep quiet about it to avoid mockery—but . . . love’s something you get better at with practice. Loving Hannah, every day, behaving in a loving way toward her—that was Damon’s spiritual practice.”

  Paula laughed suddenly. “I never put it to him in those terms—he’d have told me to pull my brain out of my arse—but I managed to make him understand the basic principle. Men who treat their wives badly treat their lovers badly too. Always, always—maybe not straightaway, but eventually. And the opposite’s equally true: if you treat your wife well, you’ll treat your lover well. So, if you’re ever looking for a mistress, make sure you don’t choose a woman who speaks ill of her husband. Choose someone like me—I adore Fergus. Not romantically, and very differently from how I adored Damon, but I still love him to bits. And by putting that love into practice every day, I’m getting better at being a loving person—and that benefits—” Paula broke off with a sharp intake of breath. “That benefited Damon,” she said, altering the tense.

  “I can see why you don’t want Hannah to find out,” said Simon. “It’s worse than the average extramarital affair.”

  “More upsetting,” Paula corrected him. “I’m not sure about worse.”

  Simon was. “I won’t tell Hannah, but for the record? I don’t think it’s acceptable, what you and Damon did. You did a bad thing. Telling Damon the woman he chose to marry had to be unattractive? I bet you said you’d do the same, didn’t you—find a physically unattractive man?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Paula asked. “What would have been the point of Damon and I inciting each other’s sexual jealousy? We knew we’d be jealous enough as it was—it was always part of the plan that we’d sleep with the people we married. It wouldn’t have been fair not to.”

  Simon said nothing. He stared at her for as long as he thought he could get away with. Then he asked, “Don’t you feel guilty?”

  “No. Which doesn’t mean I think we behaved entirely well, but . . . we behaved a bit well. As well as we could, given our goal. If we wanted our love to last forever—and we did, and it will—we had to do what we did, exactly as we did it. Nothing else would have worked. Everyone treats other people instrumentally in their quest for personal happiness, apart from maybe a few self-sacrificing old monks. But most people do.”

  Simon put a five-pound note down on the table and stood up to leave. He was thirsty—tea always had that effect on him. “Thanks for telling me the truth,” he said to Paula.

  “I make Fergus extremely happy,” she called after him.

  As he walked through the Sofitel’s lobby, Simon imagined himself telling Hannah Blundy what he’d found out. Should he? It was the answer she’d been waiting for, but would it make her happier to know? Was happiness always the most important consideration? What good would it do her to find out the truth?

  Outside the hotel, Simon blinked in the light and enjoyed the feeling of the fresh air in his lungs.

  He knew it was useless. No matter how much he argued with himself, he would end up telling Hannah what he knew. The truth mattered. If he were in her shoes, he’d rather know.

  Time to call Charlie, who would disagree with him and try to change his mind.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am profoundly grateful to the talented team at Hodder, as always, and to my ace agent Peter Straus. In America, the fantastic team at William Morrow have been equally brilliant, especially the uniquely awesome Dan Mallory, whose inspiring friendship and endless enthusiasm for discussing books and human beings with me has added a new dimension to my life.

  Huge thanks to Emily Winslow, who read an early draft of the novel and made incredibly helpful suggestions for improvement, and to Dominic Gregory and Rosanna Keefe, for the Clark Kent/Superman discussion. Thanks to Chris Gribble for “The Cartographer’s Biographer,” which simply had to be included, and to Dan, Phoebe, and Guy Jones for putting up with another year of my distracted dishevelment. Thanks to everyone who entered into the “Why is sports doping worse than stoned writers?” debate with me: Morgan White and Mic Wright spring immediately to mind. Special thanks to my husband, Dan, for drawing the issue to my attention in the first place, and for being always ready to think the unthinkable and say the unsayable.

  I am very grateful to Naomi Alderman, whose use of the phrase “telling error” in a tweeted conversation gave me a title that I love (in the UK, at any rate!).

  I would like to thank all the controversial newspaper columnists and bloggers whose work I enjoy reading, and who jointly inspired the character of Damon Blundy in this novel; there are too many of them to name. (And, to be honest, some are people that one is not allowed to admire if one doesn’t want to get moaned at on Twitter.) Speaking of which . . . this book was heavily inspired by Twitter, the online home of much kindness, much cruelty, and endless pockets of hitherto unimaginable absurdity. Twitter reminds me, daily, that even my most deranged characters are unrealistically well-balanced compared with many actual people.

  Thanks to my lovely readers who take the time to tweet, email, and write to me about the books—I really hope you enjoy this one! And thank you to all my international publishers, who have enabled Simon Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer’s strange partnership to travel far and wide (not to mention Liv and Gibbs’s equally strange relationship).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  SOPHIE HANNAH is the New York Times bestselling author of nine psychological thrillers and The Monogram Murders, the first novel to be authorized by the estate of Agatha Christie. Her books have received numerous awards, including a UK National Book Award, and are published in twenty-seven countries. She lives in Cambridge, England.

  @SophieHannahCB1

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  ALSO BY SOPHIE HANNAH

  Little Face

  The Wrong Mother
r />   The Truth-Teller’s Lie

  The Dead Lie Down

  The Cradle in the Grave

  The Other Woman’s House

  The Orphan Choir

  Kind of Cruel

  The Monogram Murders

  The Carrier

  CREDITS

  COVER DESIGN BY ADAM JOHNSON

  COVER PHOTOGRAPH © BY SHIMON AND TAMMAR /GALLERYSTOCK

  COPYRIGHT

  This book was originally published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton, a division of Hodder Headline, under the title The Telling Error.

  This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  WOMAN WITH A SECRET. Copyright © 2015 by Sophie Hannah. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  FIRST U.S. EDITION

  ISBN 978-0-06-238826-1

  EPub Edition August 2015 ISBN 9780062388285

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