“Is he okay?” Rachel asks Paige when she comes out to the pool after settling Noah down for a rest.
Jack and Will have gone to see their parents who have arrived at the hotel down the road, and, not one to let Noah’s near-death experience throw her off track, Ali’s getting her nails done.
“Yes, he’s just exhausted,” says Paige. “I’ll let him sleep for as long as he wants to and if he’s not up to going out tonight, we won’t go.”
Rachel wishes she could volunteer to stay here with Noah, but knows that it would look odd.
“Well, that certainly brings home the fragility of life, doesn’t it?” she says.
Paige nods. “It certainly does. I honestly thought it was touch and go for a minute.”
Rachel feels the pull of tears at the back of her throat as she pictures Noah’s lifeless body being hauled out of the water. She goes to speak, but she doesn’t trust her voice.
“It’s funny what goes through your mind at times like that, isn’t it?” continues Paige.
Rachel offers a tight smile.
“It’s as if your brain goes into overdrive, questioning your whole existence. I found myself doing a deal with God that if he would just save him, I’d throw everything I have into our marriage.”
Rachel can’t help but narrow her eyes. “I thought you already were.” She looks at her questioningly.
Paige sighs. “I think if Noah and I were both honest with each other, we’d admit that neither of us have been putting enough effort in lately.”
“I had no idea,” says Rachel, taken aback. “I thought you were happy.”
“We are,” says Paige. “But it feels as if we’re just bobbing along, waiting for something bigger to happen. We could go on like that until our dying days, but is that really enough? Do we not both deserve more?”
“So, are you saying you’d consider leaving him?” asks Rachel incredulously.
“I’ve thought about it,” admits Paige. “But seeing him like that today made me reevaluate. Maybe bobbing along is good enough. Maybe I’m looking for something that doesn’t exist.” She laughs. “I even found myself bargaining with our maker that I’d happily let Noah do whatever he wants to do, just so long as he keeps him alive.”
“What? Like an affair or something,” asks Rachel, dumbfounded.
Paige nods. “I can’t imagine that feeling will last long, mind, but right now, I’d give my permission for anything.”
This is so out of character for Paige that Rachel wonders if it isn’t her who’s had a knock to the head.
“I used to think I’d put his balls in a vise and squeeze very hard if I found out he was seeing someone else,” she goes on. “But it doesn’t seem quite as big a deal anymore.”
Rachel shakes her head and smiles. “I can assure you, this all-new, all-accepting Paige is not going to last the day.”
Paige shrugs. “Maybe not, but perhaps this is the wake-up call we all needed.”
“All?” questions Rachel, panicking that Paige can somehow see within her soul, to where the thought of losing Noah had left its impression. Can she see the emptiness he would have left behind? The void that could never be filled? Can she see that her heart has a crack in it, only superficially filled once she knew he was going to be okay?
Her strength of feeling had even surprised Rachel herself, so much so that she spent those few minutes, that seemed like hours, constantly suppressing every natural instinct to go to him, scream at the ocean, and shout that she was sorry that she didn’t go to Thailand with him.
“Maybe we should all live a little,” says Paige, snapping Rachel out of the one-way tunnel she finds herself in.
Rachel chokes on her water. “What, all have affairs?”
“I’m not saying that,” says Paige. “But life is short. If Noah wanted to sleep with someone else…”
Rachel can’t stop herself from imagining Noah’s cheek on hers, whispering how much he wants her. His fingers entwined in her hair as his other hand unbuttons her shirt.
“So, what would you do?” asks Paige, making Rachel’s cheeks flush with color.
“Do?” she replies, flustered.
“If you found out Jack was having an affair,” says Paige.
Rachel’s almost relieved that the conversation has turned to Jack, until she pictures Ali coming out of their room this morning and her indignation returns.
Rachel wavers between needing to tell Paige what she saw—in the hope that she’ll say she’s being ridiculous—and not doing so, because just the mention of Ali will probably have Paige champing at the bit to prove that she’s the woman they suspect her to be.
She shifts on the sunbed and pulls the sweatshirt she’s borrowed from Jack over her hands. It smells of him, clean and citrusy, but then she asks herself if she’s confusing it with Ali’s perfume. She shakes her head, as if trying to dislodge the fragment of distrust she’s suddenly developed for her husband of twenty years. Perhaps it’s her own guilty conscience that’s helping to propel the thought from nothing to something. She’s certainly aware that there are double standards at play here, so maybe she’s choosing to pretend that something might be going on, so she can justify the torrent of forbidden thoughts that are battering her own imagination.
“I wouldn’t be able to forgive him,” she says to Paige, as the image of Jack’s head between Ali’s legs flashes into her mind’s eye again. “And I honestly don’t believe you would either, if it were Noah.”
“I think a lot of it would all depend on who he’s doing it with.”
Rachel looks at her with a vexed brow. “What difference does that make?”
Paige pulls her cardigan tighter around her and looks out across the ocean. “I think there are varying degrees of infidelity and the level of forgiveness would depend on which it was.”
Rachel scoffs. “You sound like you’re in court.”
“I’m just saying, I think the mitigating circumstances would need to be taken into account,” says Paige, smiling.
“So, what would be the circumstances you’d be willing to forgive?”
“As I say, it would make a huge difference depending on who the woman is. If she was a pretty young thing in the office and he was making a fool of himself and me, then I’d struggle to see my way past that. But if … I don’t know…” She waves her hand in the air. “If it were someone like you, who he had history and a deep, meaningful connection with, then I’d like to think that we could all talk it through and find a way to get past it.”
Rachel feels as if all her innermost thoughts are being exposed. “That doesn’t make any sense,” she offers as she desperately tries to shake off the uncomfortable sensation. “If I found out you and Jack were having an affair, it would be the end of everything … like immediately … that would be it.”
“What, you’d be happy to throw our friendship away…?”
“Absolutely!” exclaims Rachel, unable to believe she’d be expected to do anything else. “Without question.”
“Yet you’d entertain forgiving the floozy in the office?”
“No, but it would certainly be easier to understand, knowing that he’d probably only done it to massage his ego.”
“Can I ask you something?” says Paige, before adding, “Without you getting cross?”
Rachel nods.
“Do you think Ali’s ever come on to Jack in the past?”
Rachel feels a tightening across her chest, as if Paige knows something she doesn’t.
“I think that would be a new low,” says Rachel. “Even for Ali.”
“But we now know what she’s like,” says Paige. “And I wouldn’t put anything past her.”
“Even her fiancé’s brother?” asks Rachel, desperately looking for a line that even Ali wouldn’t cross.
“I’m not saying he’d ever reciprocate…” says Paige. “But I just wonder if something has happened, because he’s definitely not the same when she’s around.”