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‘Thanks,’ I said, admiring his twirly handwriting, which was neater and more ornate than I would have expected. Did this mean we’d be sticking together for the entire journey, then? I hadn’t thought that far ahead. And I had to admit, I didn’t hate the idea. It was handy to have a translator on tap, and I was kind of enjoying winding him up about being so closed off. Time was passing more quickly, anyway, so that had to be a good thing.
I opened Sylvie’s laptop. It didn’t seem right that I was sitting in a gorgeous Parisian apartment drinking tea out of a ceramic mug that probably cost more than all our crockery put together whilst Si’s family flew around the wedding venue covering all the jobs that I should have been doing. Catherine would be a nervous wreck, I knew that. She had her bridesmaids with her, but still; we’d spent a lot of time together lately, and I thought she’d quite liked using me as a sounding board for all her anxieties about the wedding. Despite everything, I wanted her wedding day to be everything she’d dreamed of. I wondered whether I should send her an email, tell her I was thinking about her, that I would get there as soon as I could. I supposed she wouldn’t get around to reading it, anyway.
I finished my lemon tea and half-listened to Léo and Sylvie, who had moved into the kitchen and were chatting away animatedly about something in lyrical French, his voice low and melodic, Sylvie’s soft and breathy. I could listen to the way they rolled their ‘r’s all day. I logged into my email account and scrolled through my inbox. I probably wouldn’t bother messaging Si, because I was basically doing everything he’d told me not to do: I had left the station, despite his warnings not to. I’d got on the back of a motorbike, I’d had lunch with a stranger and had told him stuff about our lives. He’d be livid if he knew the half of it. So instead I emailed Ellie, struggling to explain what had happened. I told her briefly how Léo and I had met, about everything that had gone wrong. How a terrible start to the day had turned into something quite different: I was starting to see Paris in a different light, I told her. It was beginning to feel cathartic being here again, seeing it through the eyes of someone who loved their city and who could show me places and tell me facts about it that made it come alive. I gave Ellie Léo’s number, playing it down, mentioning Sylvie. It felt strange putting it into words, even though theoretically I hadn’t done anything wrong. So why did it feel like I had?
I briefly messaged Mum, leaving out any mention of Léo, and just letting her know that I was all right and heading to Amsterdam in a matter of hours. And then, before I could over-think it and talk myself out of it, I opened a new tab and logged into Si’s Gmail account. As soon as his inbox appeared on the screen, I felt bad. I’d never done anything like this before, partly because I’d always assumed I couldn’t trust people, anyway, so why bother to check? But it was different with Si; I trusted him more than anyone I’d ever met. Except that suddenly I’d started not to. We were both in our thirties now and living together. It would be marriage next, and then possibly a baby. I didn’t think I’d be able to do any of that until I was completely sure he meant it when he told me that he wanted us to be together forever. And if snooping in his emails put my mind at rest, then surely it was worth the guilt I’d probably feel once I realised I had absolutely nothing to worry about.
The only reason I knew his password was that just after we’d moved into the flat, when the weather was still all over the place and had been mild one minute and freezing the next, he’d called me from a conference and had instructed me to go into his emails to look for some details about a boiler service. I’d had the day off work and had been lying on the sofa watching Netflix when what I should have been doing was polishing my CV so that I could start looking for a new job. He’d told me his password was Gameofthrones. I’d wound him up about that for weeks afterwards and as a result had never forgotten it. I was surprised he hadn’t changed it, actually. Proof, perhaps, that there was nothing untoward going on – he wouldn’t be that stupid, surely.
I took a deep breath and scrolled through his emails, scanning them for names I recognised. I was terrified about getting caught – was there any way he would know what I’d done? Did he have it alarmed or something, so that he’d get a message alerting him to the fact that somebody had hacked his email account? It wouldn’t surprise me, he was very good with technology. I carried on scrolling, my hand shaking slightly as I rolled the dial on the mouse. There were loads of messages from Catherine, tons from work, a couple from his mum with wedding-related subject headers. I didn’t bother to open any of them, just whizzed through, looking for anything out of the ordinary. And then I stopped, leaving the cursor hovering ominously over a group of messages to and from somebody called Alison. I swallowed, but it felt difficult, as though my throat had sealed itself up. I clicked into them.
The most recent had been sent the night before we’d flown to Venice.
Alison Clarke
Sat, Jun 29, 20:17
Si,
I know you said not to text, so I thought I’d let you know I’ve got some news. Let’s talk at the wedding.
A x
I bit my lip and scrolled down. The previous message had been sent a few weeks before, on the night of my birthday dinner.
Simon Woodburn
Sat, Jun 8, 21:52
Dear Al,
Thank you – again! – for everything. Can meet on Tuesday evening if that suits? I’ll tell Hannah I’m pulling a late one at the gym.
S x
Her initial email was underneath it.
Alison Clarke
Fri, Jun 7, 11:31
Dear Si,
Good to see you last night. Hope your hangover’s not as bad as mine!
Listen, I think it’s best to keep our email correspondence to a minimum for now, while we’re working out the logistics of everything. Might be safer to arrange a time to meet? Let me know how you’re fixed next week.
Stay strong, Si, I believe we can find you a way out of this.
A x
I snapped the laptop shut, closed my eyes for a second or two and then opened it again, re-reading the messages in case I’d missed something the first time. Fucking hell. I didn’t know what I’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been this. I supposed that was the problem with snooping: there was a chance you’d find something that was even worse than the thing you’d imagined. At worst, I’d expected a couple of flirty messages. But they’d actually been meeting up. They’d got drunk together. And what hurt more than anything was that they’d conspired to dupe me by pretending he was going to the gym. We’d only been living together for six months, surely that was too soon for him to be looking elsewhere. Why wouldn’t he just end things? Leave me and move on. He didn’t share everything with me, I already knew that, but this was a whole other level of secrecy. I could still picture the moment it had dawned on me, what a shock it had been when I’d realised that our relationship wasn’t quite as straightforward as I’d thought it was going to be. It had been the weekend I’d met his family for the first time. We’d been together six months by then and were spending pretty much every day together, about to move into the flat. Catherine had whisked me up to her room to talk weddings.
‘So …’ Catherine had said ominously. ‘Tell me everything.’
She was even more well-spoken than Si, and more direct. I seemed to remember they’d been at different schools: he’d gone to a nearby boys’ school, but they’d ‘had’ to educate Catherine privately, apparently.
‘Um … what about?’ I asked, as if I didn’t know.
