The Husband's Secret

Chapter thirty-four





Tess shifted in her seat and felt a pleasurable ache in her groin. Just how superficial are you? What happened to your supposedly broken heart? So, what, it takes you THREE DAYS to get over a marriage break-up? Here she was sitting at the St Angela’s Easter hat parade thinking about sex with one of the three parade judges, who was right now on the other side of the schoolyard wearing a giant pink baby’s bonnet tied under his chin and doing the chicken dance with a group of Year 6 boys.

‘Isn’t this lovely!’ said her mother beside her. ‘This is just lovely. I wish –’

She stopped, and Tess turned to study her.

‘You wish what?’

Lucy looked guilty. ‘I was just wishing that the circumstances were happier – that you and Will had decided to move to Sydney and that Liam was at St Angela’s and I could always come to his Easter hat parades. Sorry.’


‘You don’t need to be sorry,’ said Tess. ‘I wish that too.’

Did she wish that?

She turned her gaze back to Connor. The Year 6 boys were now laughing with such crazy abandon at something Connor had just said that Tess suspected fart jokes must be involved.



‘How was last night?’ said Lucy. ‘I forgot to ask. Actually, I didn’t even hear you come in.’

‘It was nice,’ said Tess. ‘Nice to catch up.’ She had a sudden image of Connor flipping her over and saying in her ear, ‘I seem to remember this used to work quite well for us.’

Even before, when he was a young boring accountant with a nerdy hairstyle, before he got the killer body and the motorbike, he’d been good in bed. Tess had been too young to appreciate it. She’d thought all sex was as good as that. She shifted again in her seat. She was probably about to get a bout of cystitis. That would teach her. The last time she’d had sex three times in a row, and not so coincidentally, the last time she’d got cystitis, was when she and Will had first started dating.

Thinking about Will and their early days together should hurt, but it didn’t, not right now at least. She felt light-headed with wicked, delicious sexual satisfaction and . . . what else? Vengeance, that was it. Vengeance is mine, sayeth Tess. Will and Felicity thought she was up here in Sydney nursing a broken heart, when in fact she was having excellent sex with her ex-boyfriend. Sex with an ex. It left married sex for dead. So there, Will.

‘Tess, my darling?’ said her mother.

‘Mmmm?’

Her mother lowered her voice. ‘Did something happen last night between you and Connor?’

‘Of course not,’ said Tess.

‘I couldn’t possibly,’ she’d said to Connor that third time, and he’d said, ‘I bet you could,’ and she’d murmured, ‘I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t,’ over and over, until it was established that she could.

‘Tess O’Leary!’ said her mother, just as a Year 1 boy’s birdcage hat slipped from his head. Tess met her mother’s eyes and laughed.

‘Oh, darling.’ Lucy grabbed hold of her arm. ‘Good on you. The man is an absolute spunk.’