Although neither one of us wanted to admit it, our marriage was already on very thin ice. I still had a lot of resentment built up from the way he had treated me when I was pregnant, and now I was at the point where I had become disinterested in sex. I would hang out in Taylar’s room until after Jani had fallen asleep, develop mystery headaches—anything to avoid being intimate with my husband. I tried talking to my married friends about it. “Do you still have sex with your dude?” I’d ask, and most of them would nod. But I just wasn’t attracted to Jani anymore. We had no communication, and our life felt like a fairy tale in which we were mere actors, a prince and princess playing house and keeping secrets. I had started using coke again, here and there at parties, to take my mind off things. It was easier to pretend that nothing was wrong, rather than to acknowledge we had problems. “You look nice,” I said. Jani was checking his hair in the hallway mirror before he left the house.
