Nancy knew she was in trouble when she started to imagine Guy’s death.

They’d been married 12 years. They’d survived the early marital challenges and at first she didn’t understand her morbid fantasies.

In the beginning, when she was madly in love with Guy, she was very creative about worry. Whenever they were apart she’d play the awful “little did they know when they kissed goodbye that morning…” script and imagine a freak car accident, a plunging elevator, construction pieces dropping from the sky. These were different. Nothing specific and not out of worry. Not as regular, but recurring enough to be noticed.

These fantasies didn’t include pain for Guy. Death was immediate, clean.

Everything was drastic and simple. It didn’t take long for Nancy to understand. She didn’t want to be married to Guy any more, and his death would be the most convenient way to end the marriage. Then there’d be no money hassles. No public shame.

Whoa, she thought then. Wouldn’t she miss him at all? Did she hate him?

The short answer was yes. Not enough to kill him herself – far from that. But it became clear that Nancy really felt she and the kids would be better off with Guy gone.

They weren’t his kids anyway.

Nancy had gotten herself knocked up in high school. She thought she’d have an abortion, but four parents argued too persuasively, so she and Gary got married. Miranda was born when Nancy was 18, and she and Gary managed to stay together long enough to also produce the twins. They split up after four years and she didn’t marry Guy for another (hard) five, so she thought she’d done all her growing by then. She thought she knew herself and what she wanted.

Guy was older (by nine years). He was a professional (engineer) and seemed happy (not). Nancy had thought he was strong, but she came to reconsider that later. After it was over she tended to view the whole marriage, for Guy, as a symptom of an early mid-life crisis (other men bought sports cars). But in the beginning his passion for her and his drive to marry her felt like it swept her, if not off her feet, at least sufficiently along, in his slipstream.

The sex was very good at first. Intense and varied. The life plans (sex, travel, sex, business, sex, dining, sex) were exciting. But reality paled.

Guy had two sons by his first wife, and he was a diligent daddy. The five kids swamped Guy and Nancy. And Miranda, nine years old when Guy moved in and precociously already adolescent, charmed, boggled, tested, and frustrated him. He’d never had a sister. He didn’t abuse her or anything, but he didn’t get her either. They argued often. Home life became unremittingly tense.