After my husband Daniel hacks into my email and busts me for sleeping with Troy, Daniel assigns me the following task: I am to enumerate how, when, and where I had sex with Troy, write down every single encounter. The point mystifies me. Is this chore akin to Bart Simpson scrawling “I will not throw spitballs” a hundred times on a chalkboard?

I don’t get the assignment, but I intuit how to handle it: be brief and clinical. Use language that is bland and soporific. It’s like the reading comprehension sections of standardized tests, where the paragraphs on meandering rivers or windmills or what-have-you are deliberately made as boring as possible. The student must truly concentrate to retain anything so forgettable.

So at first, that’s my model: turn sexual acts into something as dull as a reading-comprehension essay about layers of sedimentary rock. Lull my enraged husband. I’m a hero in a myth or fairytale, playing a lyre so gently that the cyclops or dragon guarding the cave door falls asleep.

At night, Daniel and I watch TV. He’ll let me sit with him to watch our show, though afterwards he exiles me to our bedroom alone, while he sleeps on the couch. This has been going on for three days, since Daniel hacked my email.

I call it “our” show, but it’s not a series I’d ever choose. It’s some Swedish noir. The plot involves a murdered woman whose body the police find in pieces. First, there’s only her torso. All signs point to the woman’s husband as the killer. It’s an unpleasant show, hard to watch, but I can’t object. I remove my glasses, so I don’t have to see it too clearly.

While we watch the show, Daniel extends his feet across my lap and sternly commands, “Rub my feet.” It’s the only physical contact we’ve had for days, me rubbing his feet. Otherwise, Daniel refuses to touch me. When I say “I’m so sorry,” he glares; when I say “I love you,” he shakes his head.

Massaging Daniel’s feet reminds me of how stingy he is in bed. It’s always me giving Daniel blow jobs. He hardly ever reciprocates. I rub his feet gently; I am playing a lyre. Of course, once the cyclops falls asleep, Odysseus will drop the lyre, grab his spear, and stab the monster in his one good eye.

I wake up early the next morning. Daniel is still sleeping on the sofa bed, but I’ve barely slept at all, between dreaming about the woman’s headless, limbless torso, and dreaming my fingers have turned into utensils: some fingers into knives, but also some into harmless things, ice cream scoopers and measuring spoons.

There’s an obvious side-effect of my husband’s assignment, beyond punishment or information-gathering: it makes me, in fact requires me, to relive every encounter with Troy. I wonder if Daniel has fully considered this.

So I stop channeling essays about meandering rivers and layers of sedimentary rock, or the wah-wah, droning grown-ups in a Charlie Brown cartoon. Instead, I allow myself to fully submerge into my last time with Troy, before Daniel pried open my email.

When I walked into our hotel room, Troy was sitting on the bed. The glow of his face when he saw me! That was joy. He produced silk handkerchiefs, long ones, the kind a magician extracts from his coat sleeve or hollow wand. He tied the blue one over my eyes, so I couldn’t see what colors he used to tie my wrists, first left, then right, to the bed posts. I couldn’t see him, I couldn’t touch him with my bound hands. But I could feel the warm weight of him, sitting on the bed next to me. He dragged a soft paint brush all over me—my collarbone, my breasts, my thighs. I felt like a blank canvas that Troy was not just adding color to, but animating.

Since then, my private name for Troy has been Pygmalion.

I have no doubt my husband, if he ever reads this narrative, would shorten Pygmalion to “Pig.” That would be a classic Daniel move. Even heartbroken and livid, my husband is quick.

How that scene ended, of course—me writhing on the bed, my skin not just alive but sparking—was Troy parting my legs and going down on me. That was, hands-down, the best sex of my life.

So Daniel wants information? Here’s information.