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And why would Petra feel the need to have an affair?
Even as I thought it, I knew. Her wife was a mess. An emotionally turbulent, unsure-of-herself mess. A physical mess, too, with scruffy, frizzy, more-grey-than-purple hair, frumpy clothes and wrinkles galore. I’d been called ‘Sir’ too many times than I cared to remember, especially after cutting my hair short when I was in my thirties. (Not that I’d particularly minded. In fact, I minded it more when people called me ‘Madam’.)
That was the appeal of Stella McBride, I realised. She actually looked like a woman. Petra was a lesbian. She was, by definition, attracted to women. Conventional women, like her ex, and like Stella. Unlike me.
I was an androgynous person. I always had been, even way before I met Petra, and she’d always claimed to have found me attractive. But perhaps that was just… false. Perhaps she’d claimed that just to make me feel better.
Which posed the question…
Did she actually love me any more?
Just as that question rocketed through my head, I heard her key in the door and bolted upright. A quick scrub of the tissue over my streaming eyes and nose and I turned to face myself in the mirror. I would have to think about this later.
If Petra noticed I had been crying, she didn’t mention it. She flitted about the kitchen like a trapped moth, preparing a cup of coffee, with a slightly crazed look in her eye. And as I stepped closer, I was hit by the overwhelming smell of recently-applied perfume.
It was enough to make me retch, and the migraine came crashing in with full force.
Now I remembered once again what Gemma had said.
Until recently I’d have recommended it, until I realised what it was like to be on the receiving end.
If this was the receiving end, it felt like crap.
Chapter Thirty-One
“Will you be okay if I go out and see Victoria today?” Petra said the next morning, perching on the edge of the bed next to my legs. “You still look pretty peaky.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said through a mouth dry as the desert. “I’m sorry we had to cancel the shopping trip.”
“I’m not disappointed,” she reassured me. “I needed to go and see Victoria, anyway. If you need me to come home, or you start throwing up again, just call me and I’ll be there. Okay?”
“Thanks,” I whispered. “Bloody crustaceans.”
“Bloody crustaceans,” she echoed with a smile, before getting up and patting my legs. “Okay, I’ll see you soon.”
When she was gone, I swung my legs out of bed and tested their strength, surprised to find them functional. The nausea that had formed my reaction to Petra’s perfume yesterday had segued into an afternoon of relentless vomiting as my mind processed the morning’s discovery, before developing into a repeat performance of the other day’s migraine.
Discovery was an inaccurate word, really. It wasn’t as if there was any proof. I needed to get her phone off her at some point, ideally, but she was so protective over it these days. There was never any hope of her leaving it behind. And that wasn’t even taking into consideration her passcode. She changed it every few months and while she normally told me her new one, she hadn’t recently. I had a fingerprint saved on her phone so I could unlock it, but that had been set up a while ago and I’d never had any cause to use it. It was worth a try because surely, if they were having an affair, there would be incriminating text messages. There had to be.
As luck would have it, my chance came just a couple of hours later. Petra arrived back from Victoria’s looking very evasive. She dashed straight upstairs and into the shower, claiming that she’d been watering Victoria’s pot plants and had spilt plant food on herself. “And it bloody stinks,” she said, whipping past me into the bathroom before I could even get out of bed to greet her.
The shower turned on immediately, and I knew that this was my chance. I crept downstairs and into the living room. When I went into the living room, her phone was sitting on the arm of the sofa, and my heart leapt into my mouth as I picked it up.
I was going to check my wife’s phone for evidence of an affair.
A ridiculous notion, but I had to.
The sensor worked first time once I found it. It was on the back of the phone, which was different to mine. With a soft click, the phone opened onto a picture of some random figures that I presumed Petra had taken to show Victoria. I went back to the phone screen and opened the messaging app. Victoria Berry was the most recent conversation, and underneath her… S. McBride. Heart pounding now, I opened the conversation.
Reading the messages, my brow furrowed. They were all repetitive, and each only had a couple of words.
S. McBride: 20?
Petra: Yes please!
S. McBride: Okay
That was it. I scrolled back, and there were a few of these conversations, starting about a month ago. Before that, there were a handful of conversations about work over the last nine months, most of them instigated by Stella. And then that was it. Nothing else. Nada. Zilch.
