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He glances at his watch and sits up abruptly. ‘Shit. Is that the time?’
‘The spare room’s all made up. You can—’
‘I need to get back to Caz. She’ll be wondering where the hell I am.’
I watch in silence as he yanks on his trousers and sifts through the tangle of clothes on the floor for his socks. I’d assumed, because of the holdall with which he’d arrived, he’d already told Caz he was leaving her. A faint sense of unease steals over me. He must be going back to break the news to her now. He wouldn’t let me down again.
He finds his socks and sits next to me to put them on. Tucking a strand of hair behind my ear, he looks deep into my eyes. ‘You are incredible,’ he murmurs. ‘I can’t tell you how much I needed that.’
I digest that for a moment. Sex is different for men,of course. It’s the way they communicate. How they show love. They don’t need to actuallysayit.
‘What are you going to tell Caz?’ I ask tentatively.
‘She knows I came over to check on Bella. I’ll just tell her I had too much to drink, slept it off for a couple of hours on the sofa. She won’t like it, but I’ll smooth things over somehow.’
Smooth things over? You don’t smooth things over when you’re leaving your wife. You do it when you don’t want to be found out.
A cold stone settles in the pit of my stomach. ‘Andrew,’ I say slowly. ‘Andrew, when you said you’d been a fool, whatexactlydid you mean?’
Four days before the party
Chapter 34
Caz
I pace the empty house in the dark, waiting for Andy to come home, too agitated to sleep or even distract myself with mindless television. Midnight comes and goes, and his locator dot steadily pulses from Louise’s house. It hasn’t moved in hours. I picture Andy glancing at his phone when it buzzes with my texts, dismissing the notification without even bothering to open it, or maybe showing it to Louise, the two of them laughing at me as I wait pathetically for him to return. Or is his phone unattended in his jacket pocket, flung over the back of a kitchen chair or strewn on the bedroom floor? Is he fucking her, right now?
With a shout of frustration, I fling the phone across the room and collapse sobbing onto the sofa. He’s never stopped loving her; I’ve always known it. My mother was right: you can’t build a solid house on shifting sands. He’sweak. It’s the reason we’re together in the first place.
The story Andy believes, the story I’ve told and retold so often I’ve almost come to believe it myself,is that we met by chance. A fender-bender at the junction of Clerkenwell Road and Hatton Garden:we literally met by accident, Andy always says, when he tells the story,the happiest accident of my life. He doesn’t remember that we’d already met, fleetingly, six weeks earlier when Tina introduced us at the RSPCA charity auction. We barely exchanged three words that night, but for me it was enough. It wasn’t hard to find out Andy’s routine, and to be in the right place at the right time: he presented the evening bulletin at INN every night, and took the same route to work at the same time each day. All I did was create an opportunity.
But I didn’t force him to start an affair with me. You can’t steal someone’s husband; they’re not lipsticks to be pocketed when the store manager’s back is turned. If Andy’s marriage had been happy, we’d have exchanged insurance details, and that would’ve been the end of it. He wouldn’t have called me the next day, and asked me out for a drink. He wouldn’t have leaned across the pub table and tucked my hair behind my ears and told me I was lovely.
Andy led me on, I think furiously. He made me think he was falling in love with me, he encouraged me,hecame tomewhen he found out Louise had cheated on him. He didn’t have to, but he did. Hemarriedme. He doesn’t get to change his mind now. This isn’t the playground. There aren’t any take-backs here.
Eventually I must fall into some kind of half-sleep on the sofa, because I don’t hear Andy come in, andstartle when he touches my shoulder. ‘Why are you sleeping down here?’ he whispers.
I struggle upright. ‘What time is it?’
‘Almost three. Sorry I’m so late.’ He kicks off his shoes and thumps onto the sofa beside me. ‘I lost track of time. Louise and I had a couple of drinks after Bella went to bed. More than a couple, actually. She’s going to feel it tomorrow.’ He yawns. ‘Were you waiting up for me?’
‘You didn’t answer your phone,’ I say tightly. ‘Or reply to any of my texts.’
He gets up abruptly and goes over to the drinks cabinet, pouring himself a Scotch. ‘I told you not to wait up,’ he says, his back towards me. ‘My train was delayed because of—’
‘A security scare. I got your text.’
I can almost hear the wheels turning in his head as he tries to work out what I know, how much trouble he may be in. He must realise it would have been easy enough for me to check his story. ‘I don’t know why you’re making such a big thing of this,’ he says finally, settling in an armchair on the other side of the room. Putting distance between us. ‘You knew where I was.’
‘Until three in the morning?’
‘You want me to text you every time I take a shit now?’
It’s a measure of how uncomfortable he is with this conversation that’s he’s so uncharacteristically coarse. ‘It would’ve been nice to know you’d got to Brighton safely,’ I snap. ‘Given there was asecurity scare.’
‘Look, what is this?’ he says irritably. ‘It’s been a long day at work, I’ve been worried sick about my daughter, and it’s late. The last thing I need when I finally get home is the third degree from you.’
I’m tired of the verbal fencing. Tired of his lies. ‘There was no security scare,’ I say coldly. ‘Your train wasn’t delayed. Why don’tyoutellmewhat “this” is?’
