Page 8 of The Work Husband

We stayed while Molly gave the baby another feed, finishing the champagne and eating half the cupcakes. Ben changed the baby’s nappy, and Molly started to nod off on the sofa, so we decided it was time to leave.

We walked in silence to the bus stop, holding hands. I didn’t need to ask Sam what he was feeling; I knew. The pressure of his palm against mine, the faraway look in his eyes, the damp patch on his jumper where Arthur had sicked up some milk, all told me.

Then, just as our bus came into view, I heard the familiar beep of Sam’s phone. He fumbled for it in his pocket, glanced without much interest at the screen – and everything changed.

FOUR

I knew before I opened my eyes the next morning that it was Sunday. Almost immediately after becoming aware of that, I remembered what had happened the evening before and realised that today wasn’t going to be like the others.

Back when I was working on yachts, Sundays had been like any other day – getting up what felt like seconds after my head had touched the pillow the night before, blearily making myself a coffee before I had to start making them for guests, and then spending all day on my feet, rushing round like my Shellaced toenails were on fire doing everything from making cocktails to babysitting toddlers to managing my team, all the while hoping that no one would throw an almighty strop or fall (or, in my case, jump) off the boat.

It sounds stupid, I know, but it was only when I returned to the real world and got a real job that I realised Sundays were a Thing. A day to be spent in bed recovering from a hangover, trying to get a jump-start on the week ahead, seeing an afternoon movie, getting rashly drunk over brunch – whatever. But whatever it was, it was a Thing.

Actually, to be more specific, I only realised when I met Sam. I’d spent a Saturday night at his place for the first time and woke up to see his face on the pillow next to mine, already awake and smiling.

The smile widened as soon as he saw my eyes open, and he said, ‘It’s Sunday! What shall we do?’

‘What do you mean, what shall we do?’ I asked blearily, rolling into his arms to do the first thing that occurred to me.

And when we’d finished that, he sat up, stretched luxuriantly and asked again, ‘Now what shall we do?’

It had become a ritual. Every Sunday – or as near as made no difference – when we woke up, one of us would say, ‘It’s Sunday,’ and the other would continue, ‘What shall we do?’

Sometimes we didn’t do anything much – caught up with housework or, worst case, actual work work, had a nap together, cooked some meals for the freezer. Sometimes we binge-watched whatever looked good on Netflix. But often we went out and did something special – drove to the seaside in Sam’s battered Volkswagen, went somewhere fancy for lunch, wandered round the shops, a museum or an art gallery.

But whatever we ended up doing, we did it together, because it was Sunday – the day we’d have together before the madness of the working week, when we only got to see each other in the mornings before work and the evenings before bed.

But today – the day after we met Molly and Ben’s baby and Sam’s phone beeped with the text that had sounded just the same as every other text, until I realised it wasn’t – was different.

Before he’d even read the text, Sam’s face had changed. That dreamy expression that had been on it since he first picked up Arthur vanished, replaced with closed-off immobility. When I asked if he was okay, he said, ‘Sure,’ and something about the way he said it made me know not to ask again.

So I didn’t. Not until we got home, anyway, when he sat down on the sofa and started to compose a text of his own. It took a long time. I half-watched, in between clearing up the chaos left by my earlier cupcake-making, as he tapped away at his screen, stopped, looked at it and tapped again.

Of course, though I tried to focus on sweeping spilled blue sprinkles into my hand for as long as I could, it wasn’t long before I had to ask another question. ‘Who are you texting?’

I might have expected the answer I got from someone else, but not from Sam. So when it came, it was almost shocking.

‘No one,’ he said.

I dropped the sprinkles.

But clearly, it hadn’t been no one. A text received and responded to from ‘no one’ wouldn’t have left Sam silent and guarded all evening, or led him to announce at half past eight that he was off to bed and wasn’t hungry. It wouldn’t have made him pretend, when eventually I joined him, that he was asleep when he plainly wasn’t, his shoulders rigidly still and the glow of his phone clearly visible even though it was face down on the bedside table next to him.

So I knew, with a feeling of chilly dread that had kept me awake much of the night and impinged on my consciousness the moment I woke up, that this Sunday wasn’t going to be like other Sundays.

On the surface, everything seemed normal: Sam breathing evenly next to me; Milton on my legs; the battered old teddy bear my grandfather gave me when I was a baby regarding me beadily from his place on the shelf.

Everything seemed normal. But deep down, I knew it wasn’t.

Still, some cowardly, conflict-avoidant part of me wanted to pretend that nothing was wrong. Maybe if I did, Sam would too, and we could carry on with our day as if nothing had happened yesterday, and if we pretended hard enough, then whatever it had been would go away.

I didn’t really articulate all of this to myself, of course. I just heard my voice, carrying across the pillows to Sam, say, ‘It’s Sunday.’

Sayitsayitsayit.

But he didn’t.

‘Yeah. I should get up.’