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Kyle and me are going to be doing a special live show with Kyle’s therapist, Jana, and I know it’s going to be really deep and authentic and a really private moment, so I hope you’ll all be able to join us. I’ll pop a link in the description bar below.
I still believe so,somuch in marriage, love, and rebuilding. And one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in life is you’ve sometimes got to go back and deal with really uncomfortable situations and be able to process them so you can heal.
Because otherwise the past catches up with you, doesn’t it?
chapter 21
millie
Tom’s changed the password on his phone.
It’s been set to Meddie’s birthday for as long as I can remember: 010409. I tap the six digits into the screen again, one ear cocked to the sound of Tom in the shower, but the phone stays resolutely locked.
There’s only one reason a man suddenly changes his password.
He hasn’t been himself for weeks now. It’s not just the time he’s spending working out or the new clothes in his wardrobe – he seems to have lost hisspark. Tom’s always been the upbeat, positive one: he believes in the fundamentalgoodnessin human nature, while I lean towards a Hobbesian vision of life as nasty, brutish and short. But recently he’s been moping around the house, a heavy black cloud almost visibly hovering over him. He’s short with me, grumpy with the kids. And things have definitely tailed off in the bedroom: it’s beenweeks.
There’s something going on with him and Harper Conway, I’m sure of it. Maybe not an affair, not yet. Butsomething.
I hear the sound of the shower cease, and quickly put Tom’s phone back on the bedside table. I don’t feel great about spying on my husband, but I tell myself the ends justify the means.
I’ve never doubted him before. He’s been my biggest cheerleader and staunchest supporter since we were kids in the playground. He knows my darkness and he still loves me. I can’t imagine many men who’d be able to live with me. He knows how much I love him, but I’m aware I’m not very good at showing it. I don’t knowhow.
But he’s not a saint. He wouldn’t be human if he didn’t sometimes long for a simpler life. A simpler woman.
The mistake he’s making is thinking Harper is his gateway to either.
‘You need to wake the kids up,’ Tom says, towelling his hair dry as he comes back into the bedroom. ‘The surveyor’s coming today. I thought you said we had to get the house ready for him?’
‘Shit,’ I exclaim.
I’d completely forgotten. Our house is more than a hundred years old: its foundations have shifted and none of the floors are level, so some doors stick and certain windows have to be opened with care. When we renovated the property and dug out the basement, we underpinned the house structurally, but even I can’t turn back time. If you put a marble on the floor at one end of the kitchen, it’ll roll slowly but inevitably to the other side.
Selling a house to a prospective buyer is the easy bit. A property is sold in the first ten minutes based on the emotions it elicits. You’re selling a lifestyle, not a pile of bricks and mortar: a dreamworld of crisp white linen duvet covers, vases of fresh lilies in every room, Pol Roger champagne in the fridge and a single bowl filled with gleaming fruit on the kitchen island. In this fantasy world, there are no phone chargers snaking across sticky countertops, or jumble of shoes tossed inside the back door.
But a surveyor isn’t interested in the characterful idiosyncrasies of an older property. He’s just looking for reasons to knock thousands off our asking price – thousands we simply can’t afford to lose given how much we’re paying for the Glass House.
We whirl into action: I take the ground floor and basement, and Tom looks after the rest of the house. Humidity and the heat of summer have caused the floorboards in the kitchen near the sink to buckle, so I throw an expensive grey and white rug from the dining room over the offending area. Upstairs, Tom puts all the batteries back in the smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, which chirp in the middle of the night at random intervals for no reason we’ve ever been able to find, and turns on the lights in our bedroom from the bedside dimmers to hide the fact that when you use the main wall switch, they flicker.
‘Did you put the suitcases in front of the dodgy air handler in the basement?’ Tom asks, when we meet back downstairs with the kids.
‘Yes. Has anyone seen my phone?’
‘Christ, Mum,’ Meddie says. ‘Again?’
We spend a fruitless five minutes looking for it before Tom thinks to call my number and I track it to the top of the cistern in the downstairs bathroom.
Time is short and we hustle the kids out to the car. Meddie’s arm is still in a sling, and Peter solicitously helps her with her seatbelt and checks she’s comfortable against the extra cushions I put in the car. Tom throws an approving glance at him, and then looks meaningfully at me:see, I told you it was nothing to worry about.
This is our first excursion since Meddie’s accident, and Tom has decided on brunch at the Pizza Express on the King’s Road, because this is what normal families do, andwe are a normal family. It takes us a while to find a parking space nearby: in the end, Tom ruthlessly nips in and steals one from a car patiently waiting with its indicators on.
‘Nice one, Dad,’ Meddie says.
The other vehicle beeps angrilyat us, and then drives on.
I’m just sorting out the parking meter when Tom comes up behind me and nudges my arm.
‘Isn’t that—?’
