“Love you too,” he says, alongside a goofy photo of himself, with his head cocked to one side, his tongue poking out and each eye going in opposite directions. Despite smiling as she caresses his face on the screen, Rachel can’t help the tears from pooling in her eyes as she contemplates the enormity of the lie she may have lived.
She’d told herself twenty years ago that it wasn’t so; convinced herself it couldn’t be so. At the time, the dates had been crystal clear in her head; she’d not seen Jack for two weeks after she’d said goodbye to Noah. But over time, the days had become fuzzy and now she couldn’t be sure that her last period had been exactly when she thought it was, which, coupled with Josh’s surprise appearance ten days early, all added to the melting pot she’d tried so desperately to stop boiling over.
But now she has to face the fact that that million-to-one chance is a very real possibility. Josh does have the same jawline and single dimple that Noah has, and although his eyes are the same color as Jack’s, there’s just something about the profile of his face that reminds her so much of Noah.
As she lies there, the more she thinks about the similarities, the more she finds. The way they push their hair back from their face. How they stand with their hands on their hips when they’re frustrated. Their laid-back demeanor …
She runs her hands through her hair and silently screams. What has she done?
There’s not a morsel of regret attached to spending that one night with Noah. Jack was probably out doing exactly the same, yet, while he might not be able to recall the girl’s name if you asked him now, Rachel would be able to describe with a burning intensity how it felt to have Noah make love to her.
Sleeping with him wasn’t where she’d gone wrong. Getting pregnant wasn’t where she’d gone wrong; just looking at Josh’s kooky face on the screen tells her that. No, the only mistake she’d made was passing him off as Jack’s child, without question. That’s where she was at fault.
Stop! she says to herself, banging her hands on the mattress in frustration. This is crazy. She’d put these doubts from her mind for years and now she’s allowing a passing comment from a stranger to stir it all up again? The invisible barrier that she’s relied on to buffer her emotions for all this time has just had a chip knocked out of it.
“That’s all this is,” she says aloud.
But now that Noah has shown his hand, possibly in the presence of Ali, she feels a gut-wrenching fear that, one way or another, her secret is about to be revealed.
She can’t even begin to imagine the damage that would be caused if either of them voiced their suspicions, even if they were proven to be misplaced. She can’t remember when exactly they’d decided to not tell Jack and Paige that anything had ever happened between them; she couldn’t recall an actual conversation, they’d both just silently decided that it was best kept between themselves if they had any chance of remaining friends. They hadn’t exactly lied; they’d just not told the truth.
And for the sake of their friendship, it had been the right thing to do. That part of their relationship was over, almost as quickly as it had begun. And there had been no prospect of it ever being rekindled. Until tonight.
Rachel imagines the shoe being on the other foot and it being Jack and Paige who were best friends before she came along. She knows she would have grilled him incessantly, unable to believe that a man and a woman could ever be truly platonic. Suddenly, seeing it from Jack’s perspective makes her not only feel guilty, but grateful that he too hasn’t asked the question that she realizes has been buried deep in her psyche all this time: “Is Josh mine?”
The devastation that would be wreaked if Jack discovered that the trust he’d shown her had been abused doesn’t bear thinking about. The possibility, however remote, that Josh is the lasting legacy of her deceit makes Rachel want to be sick.
She’s suddenly reminded of everything she stands to lose. She wishes Jack were here, so that she could selfishly check that her rising panic is unnecessary: be reassured that he doesn’t know anything more than he has for all these years about her and Noah; that Ali hasn’t felt the need to impart whatever she may have caught the tail end of. Because that’s all Rachel is convinced she could have witnessed: seeing Noah, drunk and maudlin, fall into her for an unrequited kiss. That’s it. That’s the worst-case scenario she will allow herself to believe because anything more makes her brain explode.
She huffs as she turns onto her side in an exaggerated motion, hoping that it will reset her frenzied brain and let her drift off to sleep. But just as her head falls into the pillow, she’s sure she hears a splash. She lifts herself up again, listening with both ears, like hunted prey waiting for something to pounce.
There it is again. Leaving the light of her phone on the bed, she tiptoes toward the terrace doors and silently slides one open before stepping out onto the cold tiled floor. She can hear hushed talking and a quiet giggle before she gets near enough to the glass balustrade to look out onto the pool below.
The azure mosaic tiles sparkle as the underwater lighting casts a luminous glow across the soft ripples that the bodies in there are creating. Rachel can make out the silhouette of two people fused together as one, their heads close together, their shoulders half-submerged. She listens to the drawn-out silence they’re immersed in, waiting for one of them to say something that she can identify with; that she can identify them with. But for the moment it could be anyone: Will and Ali, Noah and Paige, it might even have been her and Jack if he had had his way earlier. She tries to shake any other combination from her mind, yet all she can see, as the shaft of light between the couple closes in even further, is the darkened outline of Jack and Ali.
She doesn’t want to watch, but she can’t tear herself away, mesmerized by the motion of the water as it swells and falls over the infinity edge, each undulation bigger than the last as the thrusting action in the pool increases.
“Don’t stop,” she hears a female voice cry.
Rachel’s gut twists around itself as the sound of Ali’s voice suddenly makes her face clearer. In her mind she can see her, contorting in ecstasy, as Jack brings her to a climax.
As Ali cries out, Rachel is unable to stop herself from grabbing her dress from the back of the chair, wrapping it around her waist and tying it in a hasty bow. Rage and fear propel her across the landing and down the stairs. As she crosses the living room, she imagines what she’s going to say when she’s face to face with her husband, who she’s caught red-handed in the act with his brother’s fiancée.
“You fucking bastard!” she’ll scream, as she attempts to drag him out of the water. “How could you? And with her, of all people.”
He’ll initially deny any wrongdoing as his brain overreacts to the predicament he finds himself in, working a second or two behind the surefire reality of what his wife has just witnessed.
“How could you do this to Josh?” she’ll yell, with arms flailing.
“To Josh?” he’ll reiterate, his tone cold and unforgiving. “Don’t you think you’re the one who has to answer for what you’ve done to our son? For lying to him for all these years; pretending I was his father when you knew damn well that I wasn’t.”
The confrontation crashes back and forth in her head in the seconds it takes for her to reach the patio doors and throw them open. She knows what’s coming. She knows what to expect. So when she finds Ali and Will standing there, naked and shivering, she’s stumped.
“Rachel!” he says, instinctively covering himself with his hands.
She immediately senses that she’s standing between them and their modesty, and reaches for their towels on the sunbed while her misplaced rage dissipates.
“I’m … I’m so sorry,” she stutters, embarrassment flushing her cheeks.