“Get out!” I screamed, stumbling back. “Get out of this house.”
Calmly, he closed the front door and faced me. “Calm down, Violet. I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking or how much you’ve wound yourself up, but you need to hear me when I say that I’ve not been home to my wife in three years.” His voice was deep and even, as if he were trying to talk someone off a ledge. Which maybe he was.
“Whatever. I’m not interested.” I flounced into the living room.
He was right behind me. “I’ve seen her twice since we split up three years ago and both times were about our divorce.”
I put my hand on my hip. “Who the fuck waits three years to get divorced?”
He sighed and looked around as if he were trying to find something tangible to back up his story. “I don’t know what to say to you, but you said it yourself—I don’t say things I don’t mean. I’m not lying to you.”
“Even if that’s true, which I very much doubt, why didn’t you tell me you were married? That’s not a small thing, Alexander. It’s not as if you failed to mention you had a Labrador as a kid or you don’t eat chicken. You are someone’s husband. I fucking poured out my heart to you this weekend and you don’t mention the fact that you have a wife?”
As I stopped yelling, my voice echoed around the room. I hadn’t realized I’d been shouting.
He looked at me as if he was about to say something and then turned away. “Fuck,” he spat, thrusting his hands into his hair. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Just go,” I said, resigned. He had no defense. Nothing to say.
“No,” he boomed. “I’m not leaving. Sit, please.”
I don’t know whether it was out of shock or exasperation, but I fell back onto the sofa.
“Gabby and I split three years ago. I probably should have mentioned it.”
I went to speak but he lifted up his finger to shush me. I looked away; how the hell did this man have me doing whatever he asked?
“But honestly, rightly or wrongly, I don’t think of myself as married. I don’t think I ever did.” He paced in front of me, talking to the ground. “When I left, Gabby and I spoke on the phone a couple of times, but there was never any hope of reconciliation. We spoke to sort out the practicalities of bank accounts and mortgage payments.” He glanced over at me as if to see if I was listening.
I was. I wished I could block out my ears. Pack up my heart.
“I saw Gabby last week for the first time in three years.”
“And she wants you back?”
“No.” He stopped and looked at me as if I’d just said the most ludicrous thing he’d ever heard. “She wants a divorce.”
“And you won’t give her one because you’re still in love with her,” I said.
“For crying out quietly, Violet, why on earth are you jumping to all these wild conclusions?”
“Oh, I don’t know—maybe because you forgot to tell me you were married.”
“It didn’t come up.”
“So if I had three kids stashed in the States, you think it would be okay for me to fail to mention them? You can’t give me that it-didn’t-come-up shit.”
“Look, I know it looks bad—”
“Looks bad? It is bad.”
“I swear to God, woman, do you have an off switch?”
“Yeah, it turns on when you leave.”
“Just listen to me. I’ve not seen Gabby for three years. She’s not relevant to my current life. You and I haven’t had time to share everything about our past yet. But I can guarantee you that Gabby doesn’t love me anymore. Maybe I loved her at some point in my own fucked-up way, but whatever was between us died a long time ago. A divorce is just a piece of paper, Violet. Two people who haven’t seen each other in three years aren’t married, whatever else it might say on the public record.”
My judgment of men was so off, I didn’t know what to think. He sounded genuine, but if I’d learned anything in my life it was that I couldn’t spot a cheater.
“I got the divorce papers last week, then went over to the house to collect my things.”
“In three years you hadn’t been back to get your stuff? That’s bullshit.”
“That’s the truth. When we first split, she emailed me that she’d boxed some stuff up and left it in the garage, but I never found the time. I didn’t think she’d kept them.”
“So why did she come to chambers today?”
“I don’t want you to freak out.”
This was the part where he dropped a bombshell, I just knew it. “Just tell me.”
“I hadn’t signed the divorce papers—I’d planned to go through them over the weekend but . . .”
“Because subconsciously you didn’t want to?”
“Because I was enjoying my time with you. And then I was behind with work and as Gabby rightly points out, work has always come before her.”
“She’s mad at you?”
The cushions of the sofa tipped as he sat down next to me. “All the women in my life are mad at me.”
I shrugged. It was no more than he deserved, but still, I believed him. No one at chambers had ever mentioned Alexander was married, and I’d heard a lot of shit about a lot of barristers and their wives and who was cheating and who was being cheated on. No one had ever mentioned Knightley. But more than that, now he was here in front of me, telling me the details of his marriage, I believed him. He wouldn’t lie. Not to me and not to anyone. He wasn’t a man who ever thought he needed to.
“Ironically, seeing her gave me the idea of coming to the spa.”
“What, she told you to go and meet some random woman, take her to dinner, then fuck her into next year?”
“Not quite, but seeing her did make me realize I haven’t done much other than work since I moved out. I was hoping you were going to help me exercise that particular non-work muscle.” He reached around my waist, and I didn’t try to stop him when he pulled me close.
“Am I forgiven?” He lifted me onto his lap, but I didn’t respond.
“It’s late,” I muttered.
“Time for bed?” he asked, as he kissed my neck.
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I need to know what else ‘hasn’t come up’ before we resume . . . whatever this is.”
I pulled back but he held me tightly. My stiff body softened against his hard chest.
“I’m not deliberately keeping anything from you. You know what my life’s like; I don’t have time to get up to anything interesting.”
“No kids?”
“You think I’m hiding them under my desk?”
“What about girlfriends since Gabby?”
“I can’t say I’ve been celibate, but girlfriends, no. I don’t have bandwidth.”
For the first time since college, I wanted to feel like the exception to someone’s rule. I’d accepted the cold hard facts in my relationships with men after David—I’d been using them as distraction, for sex, or to make myself feel better. But I wanted Alexander to tell me how I was different, that he wanted to make time for me.