Page 9 of All the Things We Never Knew

I’d never see him again, because I wasn’t desperate or a home-wrecker, and my mum had taught me right from wrong.

I shouldn’t have let things go any further than the exchange of numbers and the return of my bike. But I found I couldn’t stop thinking about him, dwelling on his kindness, the way his hand had felt in mine when he helped me to my feet, the way he’d taken control of the situation and looked after me when I was so used to being the one doing the looking after.

I know I shouldn’t have. But I did.

‘You’re setting yourself up for massive heartbreak, Laurel,’ Mel told me, when the relationship had progressed to the point where I could no longer not tell her about it. ‘He won’t leave his wife for you. They never do – and if he did, he’d only find someone else to cheat on you with. He’s not a good man. You’re wasting your time like you were with Simon.’

But I didn’t want to hear what she had to say about Gray – and I couldn’t bring myself to end it.

SIX

ANNA

It was still almost completely dark when my alarm went off the next morning. Gray and I hadn’t got around to closing the blinds in our bedroom, and through the window I could see the dark branches of the plane trees that bordered the square silhouetted like skeletal fingers against an almost-as-dark sky. It was raining too – I could hear the occasional dash of drops on the windowpane and the swish of car tyres on the wet tarmac.

Pulling the duvet up to my chin, I turned over in bed, the movement making me realise that my head was banging and I felt sick. Gray was lying next to me, his pyjamaed back motionless. I didn’t reach out to touch him; I just looked at his solid, familiar form on the right-hand side of our bed, where it had been almost every morning for twenty years.

Abruptly, the details of the previous night came rushing back. As soon as Gray had said her name – Laurel’s name – I’d stood up, fetched a clean glass and splashed some red wine into it from the bottle I had opened earlier. Now, I found I couldn’t remember the details of what he’d told me – the wine and the gin I’d drunk earlier had seen to that.

But the gist was there. My husband was sick. He was sick, and he was in love with another woman.

I remembered Lulu coming home from her night out, responsibly letting herself into the house at exactly five to ten. I remembered hearing her clumpy trainers step across the hallway then stop, and I imagined her standing at the top of the stairs, seeing the lights on down in the kitchen, hesitating while she decided whether to come and tell us she was home or go straight up to her bedroom and start texting the friends she’d said goodbye to ten minutes before.

Don’t, Lulu, I thought, watching as Gray too turned towards the stairs, his face expectant and wary. Don’t come down and see us like this, the candles extinguished, the Marks & Spencer chocolate torte untouched in its packaging, the bottles of wine and whisky almost empty.

But she did.

She came into kitchen a few seconds later, her face glowing with cold, excitement and make-up (That had better not be my new Hourglass palette, I thought inconsequentially), her hands deep in the pockets of her oversized khaki jacket, the hems of her jeans grubby and damp from trailing on the wet pavement.

‘I’m home,’ she announced.

She paused, looking at us warily. I’d noticed this expression on her face more often recently – hers and Barney’s, when they walked into a room when Gray and I were alone together. Sometimes, there’d be a moment of hesitation, just a second or two, between the footsteps outside and whichever child it was stepping through the doorway, as if they were assessing what they could expect on the other side.

There had been too many times when they’d overheard us arguing, me accusing Gray of being too absent, too thoughtless, too selfish. Him accusing me of being too cold, too uninterested in his life, too unavailable.

When the kids were smaller, we’d dreaded them walking in on us having sex. Now, I dreaded them walking in on an argument.

If things had been different – if Lulu’s fine-tuned radar had detected nothing alarming, just her mum and dad having a chat – she might have made herself a hot chocolate, hoisted herself up on to the island and sat there for a bit, legs swinging, and allowed us to ask about the details of her evening, although her replies would be monosyllabic. That night, though, she looked at us and straight away the light went out of her face.

‘What’s up, Mum and Dad?’ she asked warily.

‘Nothing, darling,’ Gray said. ‘Did you have fun?’

‘We were just talking about the situation in the Middle East,’ I lied.

Lulu gave the ghost of an eye roll. ‘Oh. Right. Can I have some of that dessert?’

Clearly whatever cream- and sugar-laden waffle or freakshake she’d had with her pals hadn’t touched the sides.

‘Of course you can,’ I said.

We sat in silence while she tore open the box, cut herself a wedge of cake, balanced it on a piece of kitchen roll, licked the knife and put it on the counter.

Then she stood there for a second, looking at us cautiously.

‘I’m going to bed,’ she said.

‘Sleep tight, Lulu bug,’ I said. ‘Don’t forget to clean your teeth.’