Anita is a wife on the edge.

Thanks to her husband Frank's success in business she has lived a lavish lifestyle at the heart of the city's elite. However, now that the economy is in freefall, it seems the days of boozy lunches with 'the girls', glittering charity balls and competitive designer shopping are over.

Still, though the banks are breathing down their necks, and their marriage is far from perfect, Anita had believed she and Frank would pull through. After all, they came from nothing. That was until she heard news that shook both her marriage, and the family she thought happy and secure, to its foundations.

As she faces meltdown, Anita is haunted. Why did she walk away from her one chance to prove herself on her own terms? What happened to the love that was once so overwhelming? And how did she let herself get lost in an empty high-rolling lifestyle?

Anita has to find herself again … but how do you do that when you're just someone else's better half?

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Days that change your life start out like any other. There is no big sign written across the sky saying, ‘Hello, your world is about to be ripped apart.’

This day was windy. A great gale was blowing down our road. Shrewsbury Road was the dog’s in terms of addresses. The imposing, detached Edwardian houses were set well behind wrought-iron railings and mature greenery, with wide lawns and gravelled drives – you couldn’t beat it for snob value, which was why we lived there.

The door of my SUV swung open and I climbed into its cream leather interior, my hair whipping round my cheeks. The angry clouds were so low they were practically touching the Rangy’s roof. The branches of the trees swayed violently. The shrubs lining our drive had been flattened by the wind. I’d prayed to St Francis for good weather – even though, come to think of it, he might not be the patron saint of meteorology. I had an inkling that he was lost causes or maybe animals. I was never that well up on that stuff.

I checked myself in the mirror. I’d spent the morning being plucked and polished and buffed. I had a new facialist who was keen as mustard. She’d spent two hours with me, discussing my diet, lifestyle and mental health. ‘It’s all part of teaching customers,’ she’d said, ‘to care for their skin in a holistic way.’

I didn’t like to rain on her parade by telling her about the amount of stuff I had shipped into my face. Like, I was all about eating organic food and that, but when it came to cosmetic interventions, it was bombs away.

The facial injections had been done in good time so the bruising and bumps had died down. I thought they’d made a positive difference. Frank didn’t agree. ‘Anita,’ he’d said, the other day, ‘if you don’t stop filling your face with that crap you’re going to look like a fucking stroke victim.’

True, I had a little trouble eating soup – but only straight after the procedures. All my friends had had work done, even those who didn’t admit it. It was the norm now and you had to keep up. Nobody wanted a forehead like a ploughed field when her friends were line free. And, in fact, you had to make your face swell like a puffer fish with fillers because being stick thin gave you lines. Bigger girls with generous bottoms had lovely smooth skin and plump cheeks.

It was like social death in the world I moved in to look your age or to be fat. It wasn’t allowed. There were rules. To be fat was like having some incurable disease. It was fine to pump yourself with poison, cut yourself open, starve and stretch yourself. You were expected to do what it took to battle time and the evil forces of gravity.

I’d got some more movement back since the injections, anyway. Maybe a little too much, I thought, fingering my forehead. Despite all the time and cash I’d spent, the mirror wasn’t lying. I had won some minor battles, courtesy of my dermatologist, facialist, colourist and personal trainer, but there was no doubt that time was winning the war. I could fight all I liked but in the end, like the little Dutch boy with his finger stuck in the dike, I would lose.

I hated my ageing body and face. I had a boyish bum that had gone all flat like an old person’s. My stomach was thin but slightly wrinkled, like fruit. There was no escaping the pouches under the eyes or the crêpy skin on my boobs. There were rings on my neck and my hands were going the way of gnarled tree roots. I was turning into a tree.

In my bleaker moments I thought my face looked like a balloon that the air had been let out of. I could give you an exhaustive list of my flaws at the drop of a hat. And I could give you a fairly comprehensive list of my pals’ defects too. Carrying those around in your head was the adult equivalent of a comfort blanket. I might have a flat, droopy bum but Shannon’s boobs were like punctured tennis balls on the end of long, droopy socks.

It was hard not to mind the way men had stopped noticing me. Once heads had twisted and hungry horny looks had come at me when I walked down the road, or I’d heard piercing whistles when I sashayed past a construction site, hips swinging. Now there was just a loud silence. I was almost past my sell-by date. I went to dinner parties and men looked at me vaguely. Once they’d have been falling over to listen to me – if I’d recited the alphabet backwards in Urdu they would have been spellbound. When my boobs had started to sag and my arse began to go flat, they’d started to look over my head. I felt as if I had once been in colour and now was only black-and-white. I had become the invisible woman.

I had highlights done, a creamier blonde than usual. Would Frank notice? I darted a look into the mirror. He probably wouldn’t notice if I got a Mohawk. I zapped the electric gates and pulled out of our drive. Sometimes, looking at Frank, I wondered what he thought about, what he dreamt about at night. Did I ever pop into his mind or was his head full of planning permissions, cranes and cement?

Whoosh, down our road I went. I looked in the mirror again. My hair was a bit bouffant but it would fall, hopefully. All in all, I didn’t look that bad. I’d stayed away from the vino collapso the night before in preparation for the party. Not including five – or six, maybe – small glasses of wine that you’d barely count. It wasn’t civilized to refuse wine with your food.

Of course, the truth was that the party planner had done the work. I’d have liked to plan it myself, to be able to say it was all me, but I just didn’t have the nerve. Like, I might have made some awful mistake and not even known it until I saw it bounced back at me in somebody’s eyes or bitchy remark. I hated entertaining. I hadn’t grown up around it, which made it that much harder.

The idea of my ma and da throwing a dinner party in our small kitchen was about as likely as the Queen of England rocking up for tea. All those things you had to know – like which cheese to serve, which wine to offer, which bread went with what. In our house, posh would have been Laughing Cow, Blue Nun and Pat the Baker bread.

As days went, I was busy. Normally I had bags of time looming ahead of me, just waiting to be filled – there was an irony there: when you had little enough to do, time expanded. That day I was a woman on a mission – a woman on the trail of a perfect party. That makes me sound like an empty- headed bimbo with screwed-up priorities. The sort of spoilt silly cow who people said was a complete waste of space. And, lookit, I knew I wasn’t organizing world peace. But I wanted to impress my husband. To have him say to me, ‘Anita, you did a good job.’ I wanted him to notice me.

I turned onto the Merrion Road, indicating too late so that the taxi man overtaking me shook his fist at me, his mouth open in a big angry cave shape. My heart nearly stopped – for a second I thought it was Darren, my sister Karen’s hubby. Guilt shot through me and I felt my face burn. I would roast in hell. I hadn’t invited my sister to the party. ‘No way, Anita,’ Frank had said, waving his hands. ‘She’s not coming here in her fake Juicy Couture tracksuit, like feckin’ Pocahontas, with her belly hanging out, chewing gum, a fag pokin’ out of the corner of her mouth.’

Calling her Pocahontas was low. I’ll admit Karen was a bit heavy on the old spray tan but she scrubbed up well. She’d be chewing gum, all right, but she’d make the effort. She was a bit revealing in her style of dress for a woman of her age – she had a thing about getting her chest out – but she was my sister.

‘She’ll let the side down and that’s it. End of story.’ Then Frank had played his trump card. ‘I mean none of my crowd are coming, not even Mam.’

Not even his beloved mam – second only to the Virgin Mary in importance. But that was because ‘Mam’ was sick with a chest infection and the rest of his family were too scared to come to Dublin and leave her in case she cut them out of her will. Not that there was that much to leave but she had an iron grip over her kids like nobody I’d ever met. Not that I could say so – say anything about Frank’s family and you’d live to regret it. But it was open season on mine.

Anyway, there was a difference. Karen lived twenty minutes down the road and would have loved to come in her yer-all- a-load-of-stuck-up-shites-but-I-did-yez-a-favour-and-came kind of way. And Karen, who could be a scary bitch, might find out about the party, I thought, my heart rate ratcheting up.

I’d say to her that, with the growing uncertainty with the economy, we were keeping things low key – ‘Just a quiet dinner for the two of us.’ That, of course, was the exact opposite of what we were doing. Frank had his arse hanging out the window on the biggest property deal of his career and we were throwing the party to show people that, contrary to the talk going around – and there was plenty of that in a town like Dublin – we weren’t about to go bust.