I stared at him. An evening chorus of crickets had started up in the garden, highlighting the silence between us. I watched him struggle for words. My flicker of hope that there was a story to explain the messages evaporated. He had always become tongue-tied at the first hint of a lie and would avoid someone for months rather than risk a confrontation. The back of my throat was caustic with heartburn and fear danced on my nerve endings. I had only just finished getting the baby’s room ready, and Stephen still had to put the cot back together. What had he done to us? To me?
He hunched his shoulders and turned away, taking cover from my gaze. ‘I don’t have to stand here and be interrogated by you. Am I not allowed any privacy anymore?’
He flung open the fridge, grabbed a bottle of beer and stalked over to the living room. I heard the TV switch on. Was that it? He was just going to try to ignore it? I had swallowed dozens of minor disappointments for the sake of our little family, but this one wasn’t going to be one of them.
I followed him. ‘You can’t just walk away. Who is this?’
He stared at the television, determinedly avoiding my eyes, his shoulders drawn up to his ears.
‘Talk to me.’ I grabbed his callused hand and pulled him towards me. I could hear my voice becoming more and more shrill. Was he not even going to make eye contact? I stepped in front of him to block his view of the screen. ‘I’m Thomas’s mother. I’m about to have your second child, for God’s sake. I deserve to know what is going on. I’ve given you fifteen years of my damn life.’
He still would not turn to face me. I could see his Adam’s apple bobbing in his throat as he swallowed hard.
‘Just bloody answer me!’ I swiped a thick stack of magazines from the coffee table on to the floor. The clatter as they hit the beautiful grey wood (we had agonised over it when we remodelled a year earlier) seemed to rouse his attention. He grabbed his keys from the coffee table in front of him and stood up. ‘I don’t have to listen to this.’
Pulling a sweatshirt from the back of the couch, he strode towards the front door and marched outside. The door slammed behind him and I stared at it as I heard his boots crunch over the gravel out to his truck. He heaved the driver’s door shut, the wheels spinning on the stones as he took off down the driveway.
I poured myself a glass of iced water, wishing it were wine, my hands shaking. It was only 8.30 p.m. What was I meant to do? I pondered calling a friend but what do you say: ‘Hello, nice evening isn’t it? I think I’ve just caught my husband having an affair.’
If it turned out he wasn’t, it would be witheringly awkward to make small talk with the neighbours at our next barbecue. And if it transpired that he was – but we stayed together regardless – no one would look him in the eye. I could not imagine anything worse than turning up to drinks at my perfect friend Charlotte’s house and having everyone look at me, the scorned wife. Poor Rachel, stuck with a cheating husband and a new baby.
I flicked through the channels on the television, but the sound washed over me like white noise. I drummed my fingers on the faded black of my overworked maternity leggings. My heart was still pumping as if I were running. I muttered a silent apology to my daughter, tucked up with her feet planted firmly in my ribs, who replied with a swift kick.
Stephen had done some stupid things in the time we had been together. There was the purchase of a boat that didn’t run, which was still under a tarpaulin in the garage. He’d only started his own business because he’d stormed off a building site over some minor dispute he’d let fester for months. My reminder that we’d just signed up to our first mortgage wasn’t enough to dissuade him.
But if you’d asked me even the day before if he would chuck away everything we had for a fling with someone else, I would have said categorically not. We had worked so hard.
There were men who slipped their rings into their pockets at work drinks and just needed to be offered a halfway-decent opportunity and the – often clearly misguided – belief they wouldn’t be caught.
But I had always thought Stephen was in the other camp – the stoic, reliable type who dropped their wives into conversation and had cute photos of their kids as screensavers on their phones. He could be charming, charismatic – people liked him. But I knew – or thought I knew – he was loyal.
Who was the mystery number? There was that woman at the supermarket deli counter who always gave him a cocktail sausage for Thomas. She was quite pretty, probably, without the hairnet. There was the bartender at the dodgy bowling club he and the guys from work usually went to – but I was sure she had been flirting with me, not him, the one time we had run into her when she was off the clock.
I scrolled through the photos on my phone. It was a procession of images depicting inane domestic bliss, the sort of thing that teenage-me would have rolled her eyes at. There we were, getting married on the beach in Fiji. Posing with plates of complicated breakfasts and glasses of overpriced wine at various restaurants through the years of married life we had before Thomas. Then some floaty-dress baby bump pictures from the first time around, when I had time for wafting around on a beach with a photographer. Fitting Thomas into his car seat on the way home from the hospital. Him tottering across the lounge as he learnt to walk. Dressing up in Dad’s work clothes.
Thomas had only just learnt how to line up the camera on my phone to perfectly capture all of our double chins.
It was after 4 a.m. when I heard a key rattle in the lock as Stephen returned. I was still sitting on the couch, staring blankly at the almost-silent television, tracing patterns in the textured fabric of the cushions. I held my breath as he neared the living room door. The light was on – he would know I was inside. He paused briefly but then the door to the spare room clicked shut. I sat on the couch, my fingers tracking the movement of blood through my temples. Questions were stomping around in circles in my mind: Was she someone I knew? What was going on? What the hell was I going to do?
I knew our relationship had changed. But whose doesn’t, when you have children? Years ago, I had a stash of hugely impractical, very skimpy lingerie that I brought out every night he stayed at my place. I crept out of bed sometimes before he woke to put make-up on and would go to a yoga class every night after work and twice at the weekends, coming home relaxed and stretchy. It had been a long time since I had crawled into our bed in anything other than my faded grey favourites and my yoga was now done most often in front of my laptop, with Thomas imitating alongside me, until he got bored. Although it wasn’t like Stephen was auditioning for an aftershave advert each night, either – he was still sporting boxers that were dotted with holes.
Our sex life recovered a bit as Thomas got older, and then I fell pregnant with number two. Stephen was surprised if I was even still conscious once Thomas was in bed each night. Then, when the nausea of the first trimester subsided, Stephen remembered how weird he thought it was to have sex when there was a baby ‘right there’. ‘Especially when it starts moving around,’ he complained. ‘It’s like being in bed with two people … but not in a good way.’
Lately, I’d felt like our family had divided into two camps – un-fun Mum wanting vegetables eaten and teeth brushed, and Thomas and his best mate Dad, who came home from work when the hard stuff was done, ready to play. But that was hardly unusual if my circle of friends was representative. We’d all pondered early on how our husbands seemed to regress twenty years with the arrival of a baby, while we aged ten.
Stephen and I had told each other that it was normal, and we would get back on track eventually. We decided there was no point having a regular ‘date night’ – we would prefer to lie in front
