The Last Anniversary

by Liane Moriarty

‘Love is a decision.’

then he’d dip her to the floor and kiss her and she’d think, Oh God, I’m so happy it’s embarrassing. Of course, now, four years later, it turns out they are just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill married couple.

You have to expect the passion to wane. You have to expect these hot flares of irritation, like lit matches.

a leaden blanket of silence shrouds the house. The silence is like a sound: a hollow, shrieking sound.

‘Sophie, your problem is that you think life is a friggin’ fairytale. You’re so friggin’ optimistic you don’t just see the glass as half-full, you see it as full, of, of…pink champagne! And the thing is, the glass isn’t full, Sophie! It’s half empty!’

What was so different about her imagined life from the reality of it? It’s all going according to plan. Here she is, with her baby sleeping, sitting at her mother’s dining-room table, ready to do Gublet–and everything seems bland and pointless, just plain old yawning dull.

Her marriage. She remembers all that fuss she’d made when she first met Callum. So prissy and girly. Oh, oh, I just love him so much! Did she really feel any of that? He is just a man, for God’s sake.

Now I get it why you’re so popular. You’ve always been adored. You expect to be adored and so you are.’ ‘I do not expect to be adored. Anyway, all parents love their children,’ retorted Sophie, feeling embarrassed because she knew it was true.

You looked back towards me, and I thought, she’s got it too. Jimmy’s joyful look. I want someone joyful to live in my house. I also think the island needs someone like you–someone with that rare capacity for joy. It will be good for the house, good for everyone. Probably good for the business!

The fragility of his tiny limbs makes her feel sick. He seems to know how horribly vulnerable he is when he is naked because the moment she starts undressing him he screams and screams, which does something to her brain like the shrieking scrape of nails across a blackboard.

She’d made a marble cake, though. That was indisputable. That indicated coping, didn’t it? Well, of course it didn’t. You can still bake a perfectly good cake while losing your mind.

She wants everything calmly in place, like the way she imagined it would be before the baby was born. She wants to be good at this.

He’d cooked dinner (microwaved some leftovers and made a salad with a great deal of stirring and clattering and leaping around the kitchen as if he was cooking a three-course meal, but still)

It is just too much effort to be funny and entertaining and loving. It is just too much effort to talk, really.

she has found that nobody is especially surprised to hear you’re in pain when you’re in your eighties. You might find it astonishing, but nobody else does.

Ever since she was a baby, Enigma has cried when she’s unhappy and laughed when she’s happy. For a person whose whole life is built on a mystery, she is very un-mysterious. There is nothing enigmatic about Enigma.

But then she just got tired of hating him and started loving him again. It was easier.

Sometimes when talking to somebody she was suddenly revolted by herself, aware of how eagerly she was leaning forward, chin jutting, mimicking the other person’s gestures, moving with them, nodding and smiling, gently nudging their conversation along with a constant stream of appreciative chuckles, soothing ‘hmmms’ and surprised exclamations.

forty being the “precise age where you’re old enough and young enough to handle a revelation”.

soon they are both laughing that silly, adolescent, stomach-hurting laughter you can only share with another girl. Sophie has always thought that the first time you get the hysterical giggles with a new female friend is like the first time you sleep with a boyfriend; it takes your relationship to a new, more intimate level.

‘Grace, I wasn’t going to let you kill yourself when you were thirteen. I had my hand hovering over my bread roll ready to throw it at you and knock the sesame bar from your hand. I can assure you it was never even going to get close to your mouth.’

He’d wanted to sleep with Sophie. He still wants to sleep with Sophie. He wants to talk to Sophie, listen to CDs with Sophie, dance with Sophie, make love to Sophie, make her laugh, tease her…oh for Christ’s sake. He is driving along with his wife beside him and his son in the back seat, having fantasies about another woman.

‘Every day is a gift, Jake. Of course sometimes it’s a really horrible gift that you don’t want.’

But Grace quite likes the fact that you can think something is one way all your life, and it turns out you’re wrong, it can be something else entirely. It makes her feel free. Nothing is rigid. Things change. You can change your mind. You can change your thinking.

pure, mind-clearing euphoria, powerful, primal, lustful, blissful love for her son.