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“I know that, but I didn’t see the others. I saw him and her, and the thing is I couldn’t unsee it. All the others…I could pretend were just rumours. I built up this bubble around me that was just me and the baby in my belly. I knew everyone knew. I saw the pity and the perplexity in their faces when they didn’t think I was looking. I heard them talk when they didn’t know I was listening. I chose to ignore it.” She sighed heavily as she shook her head. “I was an idiot. An absolute fool. And you know what makes it all worse?”
She looked at me expectantly even though I knew the question was rhetorical.
“I was thinking a lot about everything today, and in all my thoughts about him and I, it was always that I’d loved him just enough to marry him. Just enough to have children with him. How deficient and puerile is that?
“What if we hadn’t lost Theo? I keep asking myself that and wondering if I’d have just carried on with our under par marriage and our measurable feelings.” She looked away then and focused on something behind me.
All the while I was rendered silent by her unabashed and undamped vulnerability. I’d asked myself all those things too. I never understood why my intelligent and beautiful girl settled for someone that didn’t appreciate and love her enough to make her the centre of his world. To make her his everything.
She opened her mouth a couple of times as she drank the cold, damp air into her lungs and then breathed it back out. Her eyes never moving from whatever she’d set them on even as her breath fogged in front of her.
“How could I love someone else more than the man I’d promised my future to? How could I love him so much and want him so desperately that my husband’s touch felt wrong and dirty?” Her eyes closed and when she opened them again they snapped right to mine. “I didn’t want to be intimate with him. But I felt so guilty for pushing him away and being so awful to him even after he’d told me how sorry he was for everything. He’d begged me to forgive him and I had done so, with my words, because I felt like it was my duty as his wife to do it. I’ve never been good at letting go. At giving up or losing. It didn’t even last long, I was so mixed up inside that I didn’t get anything out of it, but I desperately wanted to do the right thing. I wanted to do one thing right to atone for my failure to him. To our son.”
She let the words hang in between us for a while before she took another deep breath. Her eyes darkened, her pupils growing as the light amber at the centre of her irises bled into the deep blue. And as much as it was killing me to hear so candidly of her intimacy with another man, it pained me nowhere near as much as the thought that she felt like she’d failed. That titbit was rampaging through my chest, straight through my heart.
“You didn’t fail, sweetheart.” I rested my hand lightly over hers on her waist.
“I do know that, but even now, sometimes I still think I did. And back then, I believed it with the same certainty that I need air to live.” She shrugged. “When I found out I was pregnant with Pippa from that one night, I was so angry. I didn’t want her, Jamie, and it shames me to say it. I feel so ashamed to this day that even after losing Theo, I wanted to get rid of her. To dispose of her beautiful life because she wasn’t the baby I’d already lost. I was angry at myself and my body for allowing it to happen. I was so disgusted that a part of him was growing inside me, because after all his promises and apologies he went back to her. He was still fucking her.
“Do you want to know the worst part of finding him with her?”
No. No, I don’t.
I was barely holding on to my composure as it was. I hadn’t expected this conversation, well not the extent of it anyway. I was unexpecting and unprepared.
“It wasn’t the actual finding them. It wasn’t walking into that room and realising that he’d been lying to me again, that he wasn’t sorry. It was the way he was looking at her as she-she…as she…” She shook her head slightly like she was shaking the image from her Limbic system. “The look in his eyes like he wasn’t even there. Like she was nothing. Why would he do that to me with someone who meant nothing? With the fucking cat lady? Why would he go back to her?”
Her small laugh was caustic.
“Sweetheart…”
“I hate her, Jamie, I hate her so much that today, when she said those shitty things to me, I couldn’t reign it in anymore.” The stone cold expression returned to her stunning face as her blue eyes became glacial. “She had the audacity to call me a homewrecker.”
She pointed at herself, digging her finger right into her chest. “Me.”
A wave of angry heat ran through me as I gritted, “You are not a homewrecker.”
“I took from you what wasn’t mine to take. I let you give me the love and comfort that belonged to someone else. And I know I should feel bad about it, that I should be remorseful, but I’m not. Not one tiny bit. I’m not sorry for taking what you gave me when you weren’t free to do so and I’m definitely not sorry for breaking her fucking nose. It felt good and right and I should’ve done it when I walked into the on-call room seven years ago. I should’ve given her the tantamount physical pain to my emotional one.”
We were both quiet for a moment. Just the muted buzz of the light drizzle peppering the grass around us in the foggy evening light.
“In all my time at counselling I didn’t feel a drop of the relief and contentment I felt the moment I realised what I’d done and saw her bloodied face. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but it was freeing.”
“I can understand that, but she’s not going to take it lying down.”
“She didn’t. She ran straight to Rupert.” She sucked in her cheeks and then breathed out. “He called me earlier—”
“And?”
“He’s suspending me for the next three weeks, or until I can find it in myself to apologise to her…formally.” She shrugged like it was something that happened all the time.
“What do you want to do?”
“I have the next few weeks off, and then I have a lot to do house wise. Moving is a big thing.”
“Quincy, you don’t have to rush. I don’t want to make things harder for you. You have a lot going on as it is, we can take things slow.”
Her face fell and her eyes rounded on me like she was panicking.
