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reason, perhaps after the first bottle, found this from Daniel, opened a second bottle, surfed the Net, weighed up her options and…
    And come up with the perfectly rational plan of going straight over to God-knew-where to confront her husband and his laminated love-family.
    She may as well have ordered a boatload of Viagra and a penis extension.
    It was utterly absurd. But it was probably what any deranged drunk person fiddling on the Internet would do under the circumstances.
    Still, Lily was not deranged or drunk now. She was a little queasy, her potassium levels perilously low thanks to the pinot grigio. And she was ashamed that she couldn’t remember doing what she had done. She wanted to put it behind her. Or underneath.
    Rose didn’t know what she was talking about—there was nothing wrong with sweeping things under the carpet. That’s what carpets were for. Without them, the world would be full of plain old floorboards, covered in dust and riddled with termites. No one wanted to see that.
    Life was about solutions. That’s what everyone wanted and that was what Lily was known for delivering. If sweeping something under the carpet was the most effective way to deal with a problem, Lily would sweep. She never swept more than she had to, never less. She was simply as good with a broom as any other corporate executive with a commensurate CV. It was just one course of action she could take in a given set of circumstances. An option.
    And in this current set of circumstances, a good one. On balance, her preference.
    Women like Lily just did not go dashing off to Italy to chase their cheating husbands, she thought, casting her eye once more over her wine-soused alter ego’s itinerary. She had other commitments. Her job, for instance. The one she should have been at an hour ago.
    She snatched up the evidence of her drinking spree and wascarrying it into the kitchen when the phone rang, giving her such a fright she dropped the bottle, which glanced painfully off the side of her foot and rolled under the table.
    The home phone rang so rarely, it occurred to her, as she hopped over to answer it. Was that just when Daniel was away? Or was it all the time?
    It was Pearl on the line, wondering where she was. Lily felt a spasm of irritation at this because Pearl started work at 8:30 and it was currently 8:31. Her assistant had given her all of one minute before sending out the search party.
    â€˜Well, seven years and I’ve never walked into an empty office before,’ Pearl pointed out. ‘I thought you might have been kidnapped or beat up or hit by a bus or something.’
    It was true, Lily was a stickler for punctuality. Pearl would be expecting a pretty good excuse. But seeing the dropped wine bottle under the table, Lily couldn’t quite come up with one.
    â€˜Has the data on the Eastern Seaboard retrenchments come in yet?’ she asked instead.
    â€˜What retrenchments?’ Pearl asked. ‘I don’t know anything about any retrenchments.’
    â€˜Oh, perhaps the ball is still in Bob Hayward’s court,’ Lily said, knowing that Bob’s assistant Meredith was Pearl’s sworn enemy and it would drive her crazy to think Meredith was in on something she wasn’t. ‘We might just have to hang fire on that. Can you remind me what we have on this morning?’
    She crouched to reach for the bottle and was conjuring up the explicit details for a fictional bout of food poisoning when she saw Rose’s shawl poured like spilt milk on the floor beneath a chair. She reached for it, bunched it up, and held it against her face as Pearl itemised the day’s heaving schedule.
    The pashmina was soft and pink, like Rose herself, and smelled vaguely of Paris, a fragrance Lily had picked out for her yearsbefore and which suited her so much, Lily couldn’t imagine her ever smelling of anything else.
    Lily used to know her sister so well. She used to know Daniel