Apples Never Fall

by Liane Moriarty

That was the secret of a happy marriage: step away from the rage.

No one was too old or well mannered for the sudden snap of rage.

filling her pockets with rocks before she waded out into life.

Sometimes it felt like their relationship ebbed and flowed over a day, or even a conversation. She could feel affection followed by resentment in the space of ten minutes.

The feeling had been like running to catch something before it shattered, except you weren’t allowed to run. Maybe it was how bomb disposal people felt.

She wondered what would have happened if her mother had died when Amy was a child. How could the reality of grief be worse than her imagining of it, when she had imagined it so very, very hard? How would she cope now, when her parents inevitably did die, as parents inevitably did, and you had to be so grown-up and mature about it? How did people cope with ordinary, predictable tragedy? It was impossible, insurmountable …

She froze because his face was no longer his. It was an unfamiliar mask of ugly rage. Her heart stopped. The world stopped. For the first time in her sixty-nine years she felt the fear: the fear every woman knows is always waiting for her, the possibility that lurks and scuttles in the shadows of her mind, even if she’s spent her entire life being so tenderly loved and protected by good men.

but she knew they were done with it. Move on. Once you’ve hit a ball there’s no point watching to see where it’s going. You can’t change its flight path now. You have to think about your next move. Not what you should have done. What you do now.

Amy, who was handling lockdown far better than her friends, because they had never experienced the permanent low-level sense of existential dread that Amy had been experiencing since she was eight years old.