Poppy held her breath.
‘She’s great. She’s funny. She’s very nice. She’s beautiful. She’s a terrible liar, like I said.’
‘And so do you think you might, you know?’
Raf said nothing, for ages, before eventually saying, ‘Maybe.’ Then he said, ‘What about you?’
‘It didn’t work out with Ankita,’ Noah said.
Okay, no, Poppy should not eavesdrop about this. Ankita had been a bit tight-lipped about what had apparently been a disastrous date, plus she was fairly sure Noah liked Beth but Beth was with Dominic and it was all messy and she didn’t have a good reason for listening.
She stood up and said, ‘Declan, I think we ought to get back to Daniel now.’
‘Of course,’ he said immediately.
‘That was fun, wasn’t it?’ Declan said, as he reversed the car out of its space when they set off for home. He could have been talking to anyone, a complete stranger, even. In the past, they’d have immediately been dissecting the whole evening.
‘Yes, great,’ she said, equally distantly.
They drove along, neither of them speaking, for a few minutes, and then very suddenly, like a volcano that had been rumbling for a while and then erupted, words just burst out of Poppy. Volcanic words.
‘Are you having an affair?’ she asked.
‘What?’ Declan turned to look at her, the car swerved a bit and Poppy screamed.
‘Look at theroad. We can’t die together in a car crash. Think of Daniel.’
‘Sorry, yes, but sorrywhat? What did you just say?’
‘I said, are you having an affair?’ Now she’d started she wasn’t stopping.
‘No! I mean, no! Why would you ask that?’
‘Why would I ask that? Are you joking?’ Poppy could hear her voice shaking with anger. She did not want to be gaslit.
‘No.’ Declan indicated left and pulled into a layby, and twisted in his seat to face her. ‘What makes you ask that?’ he repeated.
‘Everything. The way you’ve been behaving. All the evidence.’
‘What?’ He was such a good actor. He sounded genuinely confused and horrified.
It wasn’t just Poppy’s voice that was shaking now, it was her whole body. ‘Okay,’ she said. And then she began. She ran through all the times he’d acted distantly or weirdly or suspiciously, the things with his laptop and his phone, the way hesmelleddifferent, and then got to the Sally thing. By the end of it her voice was hoarse and she was crying.
‘No, Poppy, no, no, no,’ Declan said, when she’d finally finished.
He reached towards her and she jerked backwards and banged her head on the car window.
‘Don’t touch me.’
‘Poppy, you have to let me explain.’
She looked at him. He was right. She did. She wanted to know everything now. ‘Okay.’
‘Firstly, I amnothaving an affair. I love you and I have never looked at another woman in that way since I met you. There are no words to describe how much I love you.’ Hecouldn’tbe this good an actor, surely. But…
‘I see now that I probably have been acting oddly,’ he continued, pausing between words as though he was considering carefully what he should say. ‘I’ve been… worried about things since we got back to the UK. I’ve been thinking a lot about various things. And I am so, so sorry if that’s made me seem distant and made you think that I might be having an affair. Please believe me, Poppy, I would never do that. And the new smell is literally just a different aftershave because they don’t sell my Oz one here.’
Poppy wanted to believe himsomuch. But no. She shook her head.
