Chapter 1

Clara Harrow had never lost an argument she cared about, and she wasn’t about to start on a Monday.

“Listen to this, Oliver.” She jabbed the page with her pen. “Students will immerse themselves in the rich tapestry of Spanish culture. It’s a gap-year pamphlet.”

“Mm.”

“Whoever wrote it thinks the subjunctive is optional. Honestly, it reads like a hostage note.”

Her husband didn’t look up from his toast. “Mm.”

“You’re not listening.”

“I am.” He grinned at her over the rim of his mug, and there it was again, the small, stupid flutter she’d been feeling for two years. Now it came with a ring.

They had been married thirty-one days.

Clara was twenty-six, and the most formidable woman in the languages department at Hollis Park

Academy, a title she held unopposed, since the other three teachers were scared of her. She was tall, her chestnut hair was in a French twist that permitted no strays. She wore framed glasses, and crisp blouses buttoned one higher than fashion advised. It didn’t help. She was full-chested and narrow-waisted, and every blouse she owned was locked in a running dispute with its own buttons. Clara considered this the body’s problem, not hers. Her English was clear and sharp and very British. Her Spanish was also really good. Ten years of study and practice had made it so natural that when she switched languages she seemed like a latina woman.

She knew she was intimidating. Ex-boyfriends had told her so, and once a taxi driver. She took it as a compliment every time.

She was the kind of feminist who couldn’t stand men explaining things to her, who took it as a personal insult when someone said “girl” about a grown woman, and who treated anyone who disagreed with her as an enemy. At one dinner party she argued so fiercely over the phrase “she was asking for it” that the host topped up her wine, hoping it would make her shut up.

But she never lost her temper. She just got more precise. And she never swore. Not “damn,” not “bloody,” nothing. “If you know the right word,” she liked to say, “you never need the wrong one.”

Oliver Bennett was twenty-five, a junior architect and a devoted husband, and he had learned to put up with her worst qualities for love. To him she was the one exception to her own rule. He’d fallen for her at a university lecture, watching her take a visiting professor’s argument apart without so much as a pause. He had loved her certainty then, the same way he’d loved it at the altar, where she delivered her vows like a Supreme Court justice reading a verdict.

What he wanted now, with a hunger that had started to make him quiet and odd at dinner, was for her to say something filthy to him. Just once.

He had tried hinting.

On the honeymoon in Lisbon he’d murmured against her throat, “Tell me what you want,” and she’d answered, “I want you to be gentle and hold me.”

It was lovely. It was also, after two years of imagining the first month of marriage, like ordering a feast and getting a nice cup of tea.

Clara wasn’t cold. She was warm and responsive, and sometimes, right at the edge of her control, she would arch against him and make a sound that stopped his heart. But she never said anything. Not a word. Once he’d whispered, “Do you want to suck my cock?” against her ear, and she had gone stiff, then laughed her aristocratic laugh. “Oliver, honestly. Where did you pick that up?”

He hadn’t tried again.

He’d thought about asking a real person. He had even found a marriage counsellor in Islington and got as far as typing his name into the booking form. Then he’d pictured himself in that office, in daylight, saying my wife won’t talk dirty to me out loud, and the shame had crawled up his neck like a rash. He closed the tab. He couldn’t say it to a stranger’s face. He could barely say it to himself. And if Clara ever found out he’d discussed their bedroom with anyone, she would go quiet and cold in a way that would take a year to thaw.

So at one in the morning, the night before that Monday’s toast, with Clara asleep beside him in her cotton nightgown, he carried his laptop into the bathroom, sat on the edge of the bath, and typed, red-eared: how to help my wife be more open in bed.

The first result was a counselling forum with a clean blue interface. A box at the bottom said Talk to a counsellor, anonymously. No faces. He told himself it couldn’t hurt. Forty minutes later he had told a Dr. M. W. more about his marriage than he’d ever told his own brother.

She won’t take it from you directly, Dr. M.W. wrote. Women like your wife are protected by their own image. Confront her and she’ll get defensive, and you say she never backs down. What you want is an indirect approach. Put her somewhere she’ll be slowly, safely exposed to a different way of speaking, and let her find her own voice. We run a network for exactly this.

Network? Oliver typed.

Dr. M.W. sent a link. It went to a site called Stepping Up, all soft focus and good design, with a banner that said Help her find her real self. Below it ran page after page of reviews from husbands. Our marriage is unrecognizable now. She smiles differently. Best money I ever spent.