Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

to say was her own husband, and if he didn’t find her attractive now, when she was her very best self, then he must never have found her attractive. He must have been faking it all along. Why did he even marry her?
    Touch me , she thought, and in her head it was an anguished wail. Please, please touch me .
    But all he did was stand up and walk back over to the fruit bowl. “The mandarins look good.”

8
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    Frances
    â€œWhen did the pain start?”
    Frances lay naked on a massage table, a soft white towel draped over her back.
    â€œEverything off and then under this towel,” the massage therapist had barked when Frances arrived at the spa. She was a large woman with a gray buzz cut and the intimidating manner of a prison guard or a hockey coach, not quite the soft-voiced, gentle masseuse Frances had been anticipating. Frances hadn’t quite caught her name but she’d been too distracted following instructions to ask her to repeat it.
    â€œAbout three weeks ago,” said Frances.
    The therapist placed warm hands which seemed to be the size of ping-pong paddles on her back. Was that possible? Frances lifted her head to see them but the therapist pressed against Frances’s shoulder blades so her head fell forward again.
    â€œDid anything in particular set it off?”
    â€œNot anything physical,” said Frances. “But I did have kind of an emotional shock. I was in this relationship—”
    â€œSo no physical injury of any sort,” said the therapist tersely. Clearly she hadn’t got the Tranquillum House memo about speaking in a slow, hypnotic voice. In fact, she was the opposite: it was like she wanted to get any speaking over and done with as quickly as possible.
    â€œNo,” said Frances. “But I feel like it was definitely connected. I had a shock, you see, because this man I was dating, well, he disappeared and—I remember this very clearly—I was actually phoning the police when I felt this kind of sensation, like I’d been slammed— ”
    â€œIt’s probably better if you don’t talk,” said the therapist.
    â€œOh. Is it?” said Frances. I was about to tell you a very interesting story, scary lady. She’d told the story a few times now, and she felt that she told it quite well. She was improving it with each telling.
    Also, she didn’t have long before she had to stop talking for five days , and she wasn’t sure how she was going to cope with so much silence. She’d only just avoided that terrifying abyss of despair in the car. Silence might tip her over again.
    The therapist pressed her giant thumbs on either side of Frances’s spine.
    â€œ Ow! ”
    â€œFocus on your breathing.”
    Frances breathed in the citrus-scented essential oils and thought about Paul. How it began. How it ended.
    Paul Drabble was an American civil engineer she met online. A friend of a friend of a friend. A friendship that turned into something more. Over a six-month period, he sent her flowers and gift baskets and handwritten notes. They talked for hours on the phone. He’d FaceTimed with her and said he’d read three of her books and loved them, and he talked expertly about the characters and even quoted his favorite excerpts, and they were all excerpts that made Frances feel secretly proud. (Sometimes people quoted their favorite lines to her and Frances thought, Really? I thought that wasn’t my best. And then she felt weirdly annoyed with them.)
    He sent her photos of his son, Ari. Frances, who’d never wantedchildren of her own, fell hard for Ari. He was tall for his age. He loved basketball and wanted to play it professionally. She was going to be Ari’s stepmother. She’d read the book Raising Boys in preparation and had a number of brief but pleasurable chats with Ari on the phone. He didn’t say much, understandably—he was a twelve-year-old boy, after all—but