Chapter Thirty-One
March 2017
It had been just over a week since Lydia had seen Theo, since she’d texted Jonathan to come and pick her up. Not wanting to be anywhere near the rehab centre, she’d trekked along a dangerously winding country road, trudged the sludgy edges of it, stepping aside if a vehicle dared to come the same way, until Jonathan flashed the lights on his car as he approached and pulled over. And when she’d sat in the passenger seat she’d said nothing. They’d driven back to Bath almost in silence, the only dialogue between them consisting of him telling her they were stopping for petrol and asking if she wanted coffee or a snack, and her telling him she had to use the bathroom.
Jonathan had parked outside the house in the last remaining space and they’d taken off their seatbelts. He reached over and put his hand at the back of her neck in a reassuring gesture.
‘I’ll head home,’ he said, without even waiting for her to say anything.
‘I’m sorry, Jonathan.’
‘Please don’t apologise. I get it, I really do. I’m at the end of a phone line if you need me but I won’t be hounding you.’
She looked at him then. ‘Would you stay?’
‘Here, with you?’ He looked surprised. ‘Don’t ask because you feel guilty telling me to go. This must be hell for you.’
She gripped hold of his hand. ‘I’m so tired. Please, just stay.’
He followed her inside and she slowly climbed the staircase, holding his hand behind her. It was dark but still early evening and he lay with her until she fell asleep. She vaguely remembered smelling home cooking when her eyes opened to the dark but she fell asleep again and only woke briefly when he brought her a bowl of chicken soup with some thick-cut toast on the side.
He insisted she eat and then when she’d finished he curled behind her on the bed again until she was on the verge of sleep and then whispered he should go. She didn’t try to persuade him to stay, not this time. Because she knew when she woke up in the morning she had all this to face all over again.
Now, sitting at work staring out of the window, she stirred her tea absent-mindedly. She’d ploughed herself into work two days after Jonathan dropped her home, tackling anything that came her way. Ian and two others had been down with the flu, increasing her workload considerably but she’d tackled it with gusto, with an energy she daren’t let go for fear she’d fall apart. The crisis had cleared this morning with Ian returning and taking control again and she was enjoying a rare moment of peace before she met up with Sally who thought she was still coupled up with Jonathan and had disappeared into hiding because of some exhilarating love affair.
As soon as the hour hand and the minute hand met at the top of the clock, she left the office and walked over to the café to meet her best friend and Sally’s face was an unsurprising mixture of shock and disbelief when she heard the news.
‘Crap. I mean it’s great, but bloody hell.’
Lydia thanked the waitress for the bacon roll and didn’t waste any time tucking into it. Her appetite often disappeared in times of uncertainty, but today it seemed to be firing on all cylinders and doing the complete reverse.
‘How is he? Physically, I mean?’
Lydia recounted what she’d seen, what Anita and Theo had told her, what the nurses had been able to pass on. ‘He’s going really well and they’ve all been surprised at how his recovery has come along.’
‘I’m not sure his mental recovery sounds as good,’ said Sally before Lydia could say the same thing out loud.
‘No, it isn’t. He’s angry, he’s hurt, he’s sorry, he’s regretful. Give me any letter of the alphabet and I bet I could give you an emotion he’s feeling. I’m trying to understand what it’s like for him but how can I? What he’s been through is unimaginable.’
‘What you’ve been through is unimaginable too, Lydia.’
‘He’s so sure the affair couldn’t have been as solid as Melanie believed. He’s adamant we were happy and he’d probably made a mistake and wanted to move on. He thinks he probably changed his mind about the hotel and forgot about the automatic email. He’s quite sure that would’ve been the case, but he can’t possibly know. It’s like two different Theos. One who existed in the early days and another who lived through the year before the accident and did all these things the first Theo can’t understand. I told him we had sex before the accident and everything seemed good, so now he’s completely convinced he wasn’t going to end it.’
Sally didn’t speak for a moment, just chewed her own tuna roll in quiet contemplation. ‘But were you happy? I mean, think about it. On that one night things were going great, but there was a lot of shit that went down beforehand, and you don’t just forget that.’
‘We had the usual couple ups and downs, but I didn’t think we were ever so unhappy that he’d cheat. If we’d been fighting more I could almost understand him wanting someone else. Going by what Melanie told me their affair, fling, or whatever it was called, started just after our really rocky patch.’ She didn’t need to be any more specific because Sally knew what she was talking about. There was no need to say ‘the time Theo couldn’t get it up’, or any words to that effect. At the time what had hurt the most was the way he’d pulled away from her emotionally for months on end. And when Lydia remembered that, she realised they hadn’t been truly happy for quite a while.
Sally bit into the second half of her sandwich. ‘What do you think you would’ve done had the accident not happened and he came home and told you he’d been sleeping with someone else? Because it wasn’t the once, was it? From what this other girl says, it was something that had gone on for long enough to make her think he may leave his girlfriend.’
Lydia didn’t say anything else but as she finished the last mouthful of her bacon roll, Sally asked, ‘What does Jonathan think of all this?’
‘He says I should take all the time I need, he’ll back off.’
‘Something tells me that’s not what you really want.’
‘I don’t. I’m in love with Jonathan.’
Sally’s eyes sparkled. ‘I do believe you are.’ Her smile faded. ‘So where does this leave Theo?’
