His words were muffled, as though her head were deep under water and he was speaking to her from high above its surface.
‘Shit, this is all such a mess. I was going to tell you, honestly. I was going to tell you soon.’
Lily wanted him to stop talking, wanted to tell him that she couldn’t bear to hear his voice because with every word he eroded any hope that this was all some dreadful misunderstanding.
‘Say something, Lil. Please.’
She was aware of her nails digging into her palms: a sensation, not a feeling. There was no pain, just an understanding that it ought to hurt but didn’t, like the tugging of stitches under a local anaesthetic. ‘How long?’ She heard his hesitation in the silence, heard the clanking of scales as he weighed up the pros and cons of telling her the truth.
‘A year. Just over.’
Lily heard herself gasp, felt the shock rattle between her ribs. But still she felt nothing: just fractals of ice creeping up from her stomach and crystallising around her heart. ‘But I asked you. I asked you explicitly on the phone three weeks ago. And you categorically denied it. You told me I was being silly.’
‘I’m sorry. You caught me off guard. And I couldn’t tell you on the phone. But I don’t want to lie to you any more.’
‘You don’t want to lie to me? What do you think you’ve been doing for the past year? Our whole family – our whole life – is a lie.’
Her voice was thin and shrill, a voice she didn’t recognise.
Scenes from their marriage began to tug at her memory. The restaurant receipts she had thought unlikely venues for client dinners. The weekends he’d ventured to the office when he could have worked from home. The last-minute trips to film sets that had never been necessary before. All those nights – dozens of them – when he’d been working late and then showered as soon as he’d returned, saying he needed to wash the day off his skin. He had covered the tracks of his infidelity with little white lies he had known she was too busy to question, and she had walked behind him, blindly smothering the evidence.
‘That’s not true, Lil. Of course it hasn’t. I didn’t plan for this to happen, it just did. Please don’t make this any harder than it already is.’
His voice was imploring, as though he had the right to ask anything of her.
‘You don’t want this to be hard? You think this should be easy? You detonate our lives and you think we’re all going to walk away unscathed? That’s not how this works, Daniel.’ She had wanted her voice to remain calm and controlled but anger rumbled beneath it like distant thunder. ‘Who is she?’
Daniel groaned and a ripple of impatience skimmed across the surface of Lily’s fury.
‘Who is she, Daniel? I want to know.’ She sounded convincing, no trace of the fear of his answer.
‘She’s a lawyer, from a different firm. We met at a conference.’
So factual, so unsentimental. Lily almost felt like punching him.
‘What’s she doing here? Is that why you haven’t come home at all? Has she been coming here instead? For God’s sake, Daniel, you haven’t seen our daughter except on Skype in over four months and for what? So you can have your mistress come and visit you instead?’
An almost imperceptible twitch flickered at the corner of Daniel’s left eye. Lily had seen it countless times over the years: an unmistakable tell. ‘What is it? What aren’t you telling me?’
He raised his head, catching her gaze before evading it, like a moth fluttering too close to a flame. ‘She lives here. Amy. She lives in New York. She’s American.’
The words took a few seconds to attach themselves to meaning. ‘You moved here for her? I don’t believe I’m hearing this. I can’t believe you could be so duplicitous, so devious. You moved your career – your life – here for her?’ A sharp acidity bubbled in the back of Lily’s throat. So many lies, so much deceit. And then she remembered.
Sweetheart, could you give us a few minutes? The way he’d said it, the way he’d directed her back upstairs.
‘You’re living with her, aren’t you? You’re actually bloody living together. I’m right, aren’t I?’
Daniel dropped his eyes to the ground and Lily heard the deafening slam of one door closing and the palpable silence where another failed to open.
I’ve had it with the pretence and the lies and the sham of it all.
Phoebe’s words echoed in Lily’s ears. ‘Phoebe doesn’t know, does she? There’s no way she could have found out?’
Daniel looked up and frowned. ‘Of course not. How could she? I’ve been really careful.’
He spoke with such earnest reassurance, as though Lily should find comfort in his vigilance.
‘But Phoebe gets it, Lil. Before I left, we talked … She could tell things weren’t right.’
He said it as though it were a fact of which they should both be proud: that their seventeen-year-old daughter had seen the writing of their marriage on the wall long before Lily had.
She thought about her conversation with Phoebe a few hours earlier, about her fantasy that the three of them might spend the summer together in New York. Humiliation scorched her cheeks at the memory of such a recent delusion.
Lily glanced at Daniel and felt the distance open up between them. She had an urge to walk away, to get a cab to the airport and fly back to London on the next available plane, to hold Phoebe in her arms and begin to rebuild their fragile relationship. But first she needed to hear the rest of Daniel’s story, like a self-harmer slicing a razor blade across raw flesh.
‘So what was your plan? When were you going to tell me? Or were you just going to stay here, living your double life indefinitely, hoping I might throw in the towel first?’
They looked at one another directly for the first time and she saw it immediately: not just the sadness but the fear. The tangible fear of a secret yet to be confessed.
‘What is it, Daniel? Just tell me. Whatever else there is, just bloody tell me.’
There was a heartbeat of silence in which a thousand permutations spun through Lily’s head. But when Daniel finally spoke – when he finally gave her the missing piece of the puzzle – it was too awful for her even to have imagined it.
‘Soon. I was going to tell you soon. I’m … We’re … Amy’s three months pregnant.’
And with those four short words, Lily heard the decisive sound of her marriage ending.
She stared at the whiteness of her knuckles gripping the castle’s stone wall. She couldn’t look at Daniel, couldn’t bear to see whatever counterfeit expression he’d painted on his face.
He’d been adamant, immoveable. She could hear him now, during those endless, cyclical arguments they’d had in the months after her third and final miscarriage.
I don’t want another baby, Lil. To be honest, I never understood this automatic need to have more than one child.
I like our family the way it is.
We tried – three times we tried – because that was what you wanted to do. And it didn’t work out.
Please let’s just be happy with what we have.
Three months pregnant. By the New Year, Daniel would be a father again.
‘Lil, I don’t want this to be any harder on you and Phoebe than it has to be. You can have whatever you want: the house, money, whatever. I just don’t want things to get ugly between us. Do you think we can do that?’
His voice was calm, soothing, the voice someone might use to bring a child out of a tantrum. Except Lily wasn’t having a tantrum. Lily was watching her life implode.
‘Lil, please. I know this is hard, and I’m sorry. I never meant for this to happen. I never wanted to hurt you. But I honestly think it’ll be easier on both of us – and Phoebe – if we’re able to keep things civilised. I’ll take all the blame. You can petition me on the grounds of adultery. It only needs to be as difficult as we make it.’