‘He did.’
‘Let me guess. You thought you’d help him out with his little predicament. You thought, oh here’s an attractive guy, what kind of girl can’t excite him enough to make him have an erection? Am I right?’
‘Lydia, I—’
‘Don’t you dare say you’re sorry.’
Melanie stayed silent for a while and then stood up. ‘I should go.’
‘Sit down, we haven’t finished.’ Lydia turned from her vantage point by the window and waited until Melanie did as she was told. ‘I want to know why you’ve shown up now. When did he send you that confirmation?’ She looked at the offending piece of paper on the coffee table, the one that matched the printout she had in her own bag.
‘Theo and I were seeing each other for over a month.’
One shag would’ve been bad enough, but Melanie’s revelation was literally like someone had put Lydia in front of an archery board and fired an arrow straight into her heart.
‘It was intense,’ Melanie continued with unnecessary colour to her description, details Lydia had no interest in but knew she should stick around to hear. ‘We saw a lot of each other and it was all about the sex. I’m sorry,’ she said when Lydia started to cry. ‘Theo bought me flowers, took me to expensive restaurants if we were away from prying eyes, he talked about places we could go together, islands where we could have our privacy.’
Lydia wanted to curl up in a ball and make the pain go away, but she couldn’t. She had to hear this.
‘At first I was flattered,’ Melanie went on, ‘but then I asked him whether all it was about was the fact that he was still a man, still able to do it, whether he was using me to prove himself.’
‘And was he?’ Lydia wasn’t sure what she wanted the answer to be. Did she want to think of Theo falling for this other woman or did she want to think he was using her to prove his manhood? Either way left her feeling shattered.
‘I scored the secondment to San Francisco and thought I’d test the waters with him, see if he was serious. I knew he was living with you, his girlfriend, and I feel a first-class bitch but I got carried away with the attention, with the feeling I was falling in love.’
How did a four-letter word have so much power to completely crush a person? Lydia sat down on the floor in the corner of the room beside the desk, looking down at the River Thames, murky in its depths.
‘I suggested Theo come with me to San Francisco if he was serious but he refused. He said he was too busy working towards the next level at work, and I knew, or I suspected, the underlying reason was more than that. It was because of you. Not once had he ever said to me he didn’t love you. After we started seeing each other he hadn’t talked about you at all, as though that would be more of a betrayal than the physical side of what we were doing. He said I’d be back in a year so he didn’t want to jack in a job that was going well.
‘I understood his reasoning, but I also knew I had to break it off with him. He begged me not to and then he booked a hotel – this hotel – and sent me the confirmation. He said he was serious about us and that when I came back to the UK this was what we would do. He liked to spend a bit of cash, especially to impress, and I suppose it was his way of telling me he didn’t want us to end. He seemed so desperate, but what I couldn’t figure out was why he didn’t just end things with you if he wanted to be with me so much.
‘We weren’t together in the lead-up to the accident. I’d made it clear he had a choice to make and as far as I knew he’d decided to stay with you. Regardless of the hotel booking, I figured if he’d wanted me he would’ve been telling me as much, but he didn’t. We didn’t talk about the hotel again. So I’ve no way of knowing what he’d decided or what was going through his head.’
Lydia started to giggle. ‘I am so naive! To think this was all for me, all because he loved me. I should’ve known someone like Theo couldn’t settle for a normal, run-of-the-mill life. You know, he always wanted the best of everything, you should be flattered.’
Melanie drew a deep breath and Lydia waited for her to go on. ‘Theo must’ve set up an automatic email from his account to go to me a week before today, because I received the message. Colleagues had stopped talking about Theo and the accident a long time ago and I’d heard nothing to suggest he was still…well, still like he is, so I assumed he’d come through it, had had nearly a year to contemplate what he wanted, and had decided he wanted me. It was only when I went into the UK office to say hello that someone cornered me and said they’d heard Theo was in a care home.
‘I was shocked but I needed to find out more. I delved further and found out he hadn’t regained consciousness at all. I was devastated and eventually contacted his mum and went up to see him. I was sitting with him and Anita was talking about you and this huge birthday surprise Theo had put together without telling you. It was then I realised what had happened.’
‘And you thought you’d come and take something else from me?’
Melanie nodded. ‘I deserve that, believe me. I know I do. What we did was very wrong and I’ll regret it for as long as I live. But no, I didn’t come to take it away from you. I came to give you the information I hope will help you to move forwards. Theo was a good man but he had his faults, and this was one of them. It was when Anita was talking about you, how you’d been there for Theo at the hospital, and then driving up at weekends. She was running on about your commitment despite getting nothing back, and she knows how hard it’s been on you. I couldn’t leave it alone. I knew I had to tell you everything.’
‘So you did it to clear your own conscience? Pretty selfish, don’t you think? Things between Theo and I were back to normal in the few weeks before the accident. We were happy again, the same spark that put us together in the first place was there. Why couldn’t you have left it at that?’
Melanie hesitated. ‘There’s more.’
‘How can there possibly be any more?’ Lydia’s head started to ache, all her emotions thrown into disarray.
‘Theo told me about the problems you two were having, but he also told me about the gambling.’
‘I know all about the gambling, Melanie.’ If this woman thought she could do any more damage she was sorely mistaken.
‘I’m not sure I should tell you this, but if it were me I’d want to know.’
‘Go on.’ Lydia held her breath, bracing for what was to come.
‘He told me about the bad investment you guys made, which ate up your savings.’
