Sarah looked up sharply. ‘You don’t have to be quite so mean about it.’
‘I’m not being mean. I’m being honest. Married men don’t leave their wives, Sarah, that’s not how it works. I just don’t want to see you hurt again.’ She sat down beside her, aware Sarah was still sulking. She always did in the first few moments after being told the truth. It usually didn’t take too long for her to snap out of it, although there had been a couple of occasions when Sarah’s relationship with this married man had caused days of non-communication between them.
She wondered what it was about her friend. A few years earlier, when Sarah was just twenty, she’d been in an abusive relationship that had ended when she had been hospitalised. The ex-boyfriend was sent to prison for the assault and Sarah – after many tears and much therapy – seemed to be moving on with her life. Right until she found another Mr Wrong, that is.
‘How about that night out you promised me?’ Grace suggested.
‘I don’t know. I don’t think I’m in the mood.’
‘That’s exactly why you need it,’ Grace said, getting back up from the sofa. ‘Come on. I’m not taking no for an answer.’
Chapter Fifteen
After Chloe left, the thought of spending yet another evening alone in her empty house was almost enough to make Alex want to call her and ask her to come back. Instead, she did what she recently tended to do when this feeling caught her off guard: she called Rob. It rang through to answerphone.
She stood at the kitchen sink and washed her wine glass, resolving not to drink any more. As her thoughts festered in the silence of the house, they naturally strayed towards her work. Her job was the only thing able to provide a distraction from the realities of her home life, and from a future Alex feared to linger on too long. Empty years – childless, loveless – seemed to stretch into the spaces ahead, leaving Alex filled with a dread that often kept her awake at night in the darkness of her now-lonely house.
There were things she couldn’t make better – circumstances she was unable to change.
A young woman was dead, and nothing she or anyone else could do would be able to reverse that. But she could try stopping whoever was responsible before that person decided to end someone else’s life.
She looked out on to the dark stretch of garden that lay beyond the kitchen window. It occurred to her that she should think herself lucky: she lived in a nice area at the top of the town just off the mountain road, in a large semi-detached house that had a generous stretch of garden behind it. Years before, these had been the things she had aspired to and worked for. Now none of it seemed to mean anything.
Alex was dragged from her thoughts by the sound of her phone ringing. She glanced at the screen. Rob.
Half an hour later, her ex-husband rang the doorbell. Until a couple of months ago, he’d still had a key to the house. He refused to use it, even now when they were sleeping with each other again. Alex had taken it back from him, careful to conceal the relief she’d felt at the gesture when he’d offered its return. They might be having sex, but Rob letting himself into the house using his own key would take things a step further than Alex was comfortable with.
‘Everything OK?’
She leaned in and kissed him. They went upstairs to what had once been their bedroom and had wordless sex, the type that had formed a pattern during the previous months. It had started as exciting – there had been something dangerous in the unexpectedness of it all – but what had been thrilling in its spontaneity was increasingly becoming a routine, albeit one that, at that time, Alex felt her life needed.
Not for the first time, Alex realised that it wasn’t Rob she had missed. She just missed someone being there. The house had become too big for her; too silent. The memories of it had become too noisy.
She wasn’t even sure she had missed the sex. It was just good to feel his skin against hers, to have some element of physical closeness back, to be able, for those moments, to switch off from the rest of the world. She had always been physically attracted to Rob, even when she had become turned off by elements of his personality.
She didn’t want to be with him. She hadn’t wanted to be with him in a long time.
She realised she was using him.
She knew she should feel guilty at the thought, but she didn’t. For reasons that she couldn’t fathom, she couldn’t bring herself to feel it.
‘What’s happening here, Alex?’
‘I’m going to make a cup of tea. Do you want one?’
Rob put out an arm and reached for hers to stop her leaving the bed. ‘You know that’s not what I mean.’
Her back turned to him, Alex closed her eyes. She didn’t want to have this conversation, not now. Not ever. They had stopped living in the moment years ago. Hadn’t that been what had eventually driven them apart? Why had they always needed to know what would be happening in the future: tomorrow, the next week; the next year? The need to plan for the perfect family home: a building that had become filled with material things yet empty of anything with purpose or meaning. The need to know why nature, science, something was preventing them from becoming a family. The need to know whether they would ever be parents; the need to plan for the what ifs and the maybes, the maybe nots.
‘I don’t know what you want me to tell you.’
‘Just tell me the truth.’
Alex found this ironic. Telling the truth had been their downfall, the reason for their divorce; telling the truth had caused such irreversible damage that Alex had begun to reconsider the mantra that honesty was always the best policy. Sometimes it wasn’t. Telling her husband the truth – that a childless future was a future that scared her, and that, no, she was sorry, but she didn’t believe they alone were enough – had been the final nail driven into the coffin in which their marriage had been buried.
But he wasn’t her husband any more.
‘It just is what it is,’ she said, aware that if someone else had said the same to her she would have been tempted to throw the nearest available object at them.
Rob moved from the bed. She heard him reach for his clothes and put them back on.
‘Is that all I get? That’s what I’m worth?’
‘No, of course not, it’s just—’
‘It’s not really normal, is it,’ he cut her off, moving to her side of the room and facing her so that she could no longer avoid looking at him. ‘This.’
What was normal any more? Alex wasn’t sure.
‘I still don’t know what you want me to say.’
Rob looked exasperated. There was something more. He looked hurt. The look made Alex feel even guiltier than she already did.
‘Neither of us wants to go backwards, Rob, not really. That’s never been what this was about.’
His jaw tensed. His mouth moved as though about to say something, but changing his mind he reached for his jacket from where it was slung over the end of the bed and headed to the door.