to wear pants and bribe a babysitter.
When had he changed his mind?
I should have been weeping for the loss of my family but, afraid to look into that particular abyss, I was seething for more practical reasons. I barely had time for a shower each day and beat myself up when I had to make a phone call just when Thomas needed me. I was torn between my need to work harder than every childfree twenty-something on my team and to out-parent the stay-at-home mothers I went to playgroup with on a daily basis. I pulled eighteen-hour days juggling my work–life ‘balance’. It was exhausting. Yet he had managed to fit in a sexy liaison with someone else? I could kill him.
I wrenched myself up and started walking towards the spare bedroom. Stephen was still awake, staring at the lit screen of his phone as I pushed my way into the room. He quickly tapped the device to lock it, sending the room into darkness.
‘I need to know right now.’ I lowered myself on to the end of the bed. ‘Are you seeing someone else? Is that what this is?’
He was silent. The air seemed to throb between us. I slapped his leg through the duvet. ‘Stephen! You can’t get out of this one.’
His voice was strangled as he pushed himself up on the pillows as if to get away from me. ‘Yes.’
‘Who is she? Is it someone I know?’ I paused, feeling ill, as I realised the possibility. ‘Have you been there tonight?’
He turned over in the bed. ‘Please, can we talk about it in the morning?’
I took a deliberate breath in, then out, using every drop of my willpower to channel my deep yogi breathing I’d mastered all those years ago. ‘No. We cannot talk about it in the morning.’
He pushed himself up on the pillows. I noticed his lined forehead, his short-cut hair becoming a little more sparse around the temples. ‘Fine. I’ve been seeing Alexa. She didn’t want me to say anything to you until after the baby came. But now you know.’
He flopped back and put his hands over his face. Like it was my fault that I was finding out at the wrong time. I pulled my hand back from where it lay on his leg as if I had been burned.
Alexa. The name cut through my mental fog. The too-perfect interior designer with the TV show and stupidly expensive coffee table books. She’d been working with him a lot. I should have known something was going on when he told me, completely straight-faced, that he was going to a lunch meeting with her about the colour scheme for a pet dog’s bedroom at the big country house he was working on. Instead, I’d just been jealous that he got to have an expensive steak and pricey bottle of wine while I was stuck at home, trying to write a column about a proposed new tax, while I jiggled Thomas on my knee and sang along to Fireman Sam.
Alexa was gorgeous. Of course. If you take the average pregnant person and try to imagine the complete opposite, you have her. Tall, slim, impossibly glossy long hair with gold highlights that bounce around as she wanders about in intricately patterned harem pants. That first night we met, at an end-of-year function for Stephen’s business, she had just returned from a mountain trek and thirteen-day scuba diving course and reeked of the calm confidence that it seems possible to acquire when you have more than fourteen and a half minutes a day to devote to your own interests.
Brought back to the present with a shock, I could taste my dinner bubbling up into my oesophagus at the thought of her. A scream forced its way up. I grabbed the china vase from the bedside table and hurled it at the wall. ‘How could you?’ I screamed. ‘How the hell could you do that?’ I squeaked, more softly the second time. The vase didn’t even break, rebounding with a thud on the carpet.
He stared at me. ‘You’ll wake Thomas. Do you know how long it took me to get him to sleep?’
I stood in shock, then ran for our bedroom. A pile of his clothes lay in a heap on the end of the bed. As I curled up, I realised the whole room smelt of the aftershave I had been buying him for the last ten years.
I woke up a couple of hours later to the sound of Thomas and Stephen in the kitchen, clattering spoons into bowls as they assembled breakfast. I stretched, feeling the bones click back into place in my neck, and barrel-rolled off the bed. My baby seemed to stretch too, contorting as she found her way back to the centre of my upright body.
I edged the kitchen door open. Thomas was perched on his step stool, pouring milk into the bowl, and on to the bench, from which it was dripping on to the floor. The kettle was boiling and our dog, Waffle, nudged her empty water bowl across the tiles with her greying nose. Stephen grabbed the milk bottle from Thomas. ‘I told you to be careful. Let me.’
‘I do it!’ Thomas glared but looked chastened. Stephen rarely snapped at him. His father tried to guide the pour. He looked up as he heard me shuffling in, my legs numb from the baby cutting off my blood supply. He quickly turned his gaze to Thomas again.
I watched the pair of them as Stephen positioned Thomas into his chair at the dining table. More cereal was spilling down the front of his T-shirt. I handed Stephen a cloth to wipe him, but he looked flummoxed, so I snatched it back and dabbed at the mess.
‘I’m going to ask my mum to take Thomas out for a while, so we can talk today.’ I kept my voice calm, channelling the woman who fronted the kids’ TV show that kept Thomas occupied for a sanity-saving hour each Saturday morning. My husband might be trying to ruin our lives, but I was going to keep this from Thomas – as well as everyone else – for as long as I could.
Stephen swallowed, and focused on my hand blotting Thomas’s T-shirt. ‘I have to go to the site this morning. I can come back about eleven.’
I kissed Thomas’s forehead. ‘That’s fine. Thank you.’
We were talking to each other as if we were business acquaintances, who didn’t particularly like each other.
He had barely made a dent in his toast when he stood up and stuffed his keys and phone into a bulging pocket, whistling for Waffle to follow him into his truck.
‘Say goodbye to Dad,’ I prompted Thomas, who was watching a shimmer of sunlight dance across the wall. I was not going to miss an opportunity to remind Stephen of what he would be leaving behind. I would have pulled out my sonography scans and dangled them in front of him if I could.
‘You shirt,’ Thomas pointed at my front. I was still wearing Stephen’s baggy grey T-shirt, which I’d had on the day before. There was a saucy smear across the front, where Thomas had wiped his face as I hugged him after a messy afternoon tea. He raised a puzzled eyebrow.
I arranged my face into as neutral an expression as I could manage. ‘I didn’t have time to get changed.’ I shot him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. He was frowning. It was time to deploy my best upbeat your-mother-is-definitely-not-falling-apart voice again. If I presented him with the wrong type of jam with his toast, it could throw him off for the whole day. Now I was turning up in day-old clothes and acting like his father was a stranger in our kitchen. ‘Everything is okay, darling. You’re going to Gran and Granddad’s this morning. That will be fun, won’t it?’
By 11.30, there was still no sign of Stephen. I paced the house, watching the driveway. Every time I tried to return to my desk, the words on the computer screen seemed to flitter in front of me. I was scanning a press release for the third time, still with no idea what it said, when my phone vibrated. A message from Stephen at last. I gritted my teeth as I opened it. ‘Can’t make it back this morning.’
I
