scrubbed a hand over his face. Maybe it had been a mistake to ask her to stay.
But he couldn’t kick her out now.
All he could do was cross his fingers and hope she’d find herself another place to live soon.
* * *
To his surprise, he didn’t see much of Cara over the next couple of days. She’d obviously taken his suggestion about giving each other space to heart and was avoiding being in the house with him as much as possible.
The extremity of her desertion grated on his nerves.
What was it that made it impossible for them to understand each other? They were very different in temperament, of course, which didn’t help, but it was more than that. It was as if there was some kind of meaning-altering force field between them.
On Sunday, when the silence in the house got too much for him, he went out for a long walk around Hyde Park. He stopped at the café next to the water for lunch, something he and Jemima had done most Sundays, fighting against the painful undertow of nostalgia that dragged at him as he sat there alone. It was all so intensely familiar.
All except for the empty seat in front of him.
He snorted into his drink, disgusted with himself for being so pathetic. He should consider himself lucky. He was the one who got to have a future, unlike his big-hearted, selfless wife. The woman who everyone had loved. One of the few people, in his opinion, who had truly deserved a long and happy life.
Arriving home mid-afternoon, he walked in to find the undertones of Cara’s perfume hanging in the air.
So she was back then.
Closing his eyes, he imagined he could actually sense her presence in the atmosphere, like a low hum of white noise.
Or was he being overly sensitive?
Probably.
From the moment she’d agreed to move in he’d experienced a strange undercurrent of apprehension and it seemed to be affecting his state of mind.
After stowing his shoes and coat in the cloakroom, he went into the living room to find that a large display of flowers had been placed on top of the grand piano. He bristled, remembering the way he’d felt the last time Cara had started to mess with his environment.
Sighing, he rubbed a hand through his hair, attempting to release the tension in his scalp. They were just flowers. He really needed to chill out or he was going to drive himself insane. Jemima would have laughed if she’d seen how strung-out he was over something so inconsequential. He could almost hear her teasing voice ringing in his ears.
A noise startled him and he whipped round to see Cara standing in the doorway to the room, dressed in worn jeans and a sloppy sweater, her face scrubbed of make-up and her bright blue eyes luminous in the soft afternoon light. To his overwrought brain, she seemed to radiate an ethereal kind of beauty, her long hair lying in soft, undulating waves around her face and her creamy skin radiant with health. He experienced a strangely intense moment of confusion, and he realised that somewhere in the depths of his screwed-up consciousness he’d half expected it to be Jemima standing there instead—which was why his, ‘Hello,’ came out more gruffly than he’d intended.
Her welcoming smile faltered and she glanced down at her fingernails and frowned, as if fighting an impulse to chew on them, but when she looked back up her smile was firmly back in place.
‘Isn’t it a beautiful day?’ She tipped her head towards the piano behind him. ‘I hope you don’t mind, but the spring sunshine inspired me to put fresh flowers in most of the rooms—not your bedroom, of course; I didn’t go in there,’ she added quickly. ‘The house seemed to be crying out for a bit of life and colour and I wanted to do something to say thank you for letting me stay, even though you said I didn’t need to.’
‘Sure. That’s fine,’ was all he could muster. For some reason his blood was flying through his veins and he felt so hot he thought he might spontaneously combust at any second.
‘Oh, and I stripped and remade the bed in the room next to yours,’ she added casually. ‘It looked like the cleaners had missed it. I gave it a good vacuum, too; it was really dusty.’
The heat was swept away by a flood of icy panic. ‘You what?’
The ferocity in his tone obviously alarmed her because she flinched and blinked hard.
But hurting Cara’s feelings was the least of his worries right then.
Not waiting for her reply, he pushed past her and raced up the stairs, aware of his heart thumping painfully in his chest as he willed it not to be so.
Please don’t let her have destroyed that room.
Reaching the landing on the top floor, he flung open the door and stared into the now immaculate bedroom, the stringent scent of cleaning fluid clogging his throat and making his stomach roll.
She’d stripped it bare.
Everything he’d been protecting from the past had been torn off or wiped away. The bed, as she’d said, now had fresh linen on it.
He heard her laboured breath behind him as she made it up to the landing and whipped round to face her.
‘Where are the sheets from the bed, Cara?’ he demanded, well past the point of being able to conceal his anger.
Her face was drained of all colour. ‘What did I do wrong?’
‘The sheets, Cara—where are the sheets?’
‘I washed them,’ she whispered, unable to meet his eyes. ‘They’re in the dryer.’
That was it then. Jemima’s room was ruined.
Bitterness welled in his gut as he took in her wide-eyed bewilderment. The woman was a walking disaster area and she’d caused nothing but trouble since she got here.
A rage he couldn’t contain made him pace towards her.
‘Why do you have to meddle with everything? Hmm? What is it with you? This need to please all the time isn’t natural. In fact it’s downright pathetic. Just keep your hands off my personal stuff, okay? Is that really too much to ask?’
She seemed frozen to the spot as she stared at him with glassy eyes, her jaw clamped so tight he could see the muscle flickering under the pressure, but, instead of shouting back this time, she dragged in a sharp, painful-sounding breath before turning on the spot and walking out of the room.
He listened to her heavy footsteps on the stairs and then the slam of her bedroom door, wincing as the sound reverberated through his aching head. Staring down at the soulless bed, he allowed the heat of his bitterness and anger and shame to wash through him, leaving behind an icy numbness in its wake.
Then he closed his eyes, dropped his chin to his chest and sank down onto the last place he’d been truly happy.
* * *
Oh, God, please don’t let this be happening to me. Again.
Cara
