I’M SITTING ON a bench at the edge of the playground, watching children scramble like ants over the blue metallic climbing frame. It’s cold for the time of year and the sound of their shrieking and whooping is jarring, but I don’t know this area and the only other place I could think of was the coffee shop I went to with Amber, where she might easily have appeared. No one without children comes here. Every now and then, I notice the other mothers giving me funny sidelong looks, trying to pinpoint which child I’m attached to. A couple of them are clearly discussing me, sharp, beady eyes gleaming at the sight of a stranger in their midst. Usually, it would make me feel uncomfortable, but today I don’t care. My mind is still buzzing with shock, and everything else is just background noise.
I read over the text Amber sent me a few hours ago. Caroline, I’m sorry I asked you to leave yesterday. It was a shock for me as well as you. It just all seems too much of a coincidence. I still can’t believe it, to be honest. Look, please call me back. I picture her face as we stood in her kitchen – taut, disbelieving, coldly dismissive of my tears. She didn’t ask me to leave; she told me to get out.
She’s been ringing on and off ever since she sent the text. The sporadic bursts of noise coming from my phone are getting more frequent and shorter, lasting only a couple of rings before she realizes I’m still not going to answer and gives up.
I know I should call her back, that I’ll have to talk to her eventually, but I can’t do it yet. There’s too much jumbled up in my head. I look again at that text, the word coincidence jumping out from the screen. She understands that it’s not possible for this to be some bizarre quirk of fate, but she doesn’t understand that I’m not the one who has brought it about. You’ve planned and engineered this, and you must have known there was a chance that this would happen – that my path would cross with hers. I have no idea if you viewed it as a risk you decided to take, or if it was what you wanted all along.
At the thought, I breathe in sharply, feeling pain sear through me. I don’t know why you would want me to see her. Now that I have, there’s no way I’ll ever be able to unsee the images that are cycling through my head like reels of film. The way you might have lingered at your window, watching her move in across the street, sizing her up and liking what you saw. The carefully engineered meeting, the quick, flirtatious glances of appraisal. Just moved in? Let me know if you need anything … The excitement of those first dates, the electricity of your first kiss. Fast-forwarding to the two of you draped comfortably over each other on your sofa, watching TV or chatting about your day. Sat together at her kitchen table, sharing a meal over a glass of wine. Doing the chores on a Sunday morning, hanging up the washing or scrubbing the bathroom. All those cosy domestic things that we never did. And that’s before I even get to the part that hurts most – your hands encircling her slim waist, your lips kissing the hollow of her neck, her legs wrapped around yours and the sound of your voice whispering the things to her that you used to say to me. If I’ve let myself imagine you, in the past two years, it’s always been alone. I’ve been unable to cope with the idea of putting someone else in that picture beside you.
I think of the letter I sent you a few days after I last saw you – the one I scrawled on yellow lined paper I had torn from an office notebook, a ridiculous attempt to spark some nostalgia in you. I scribbled down all the memories and everything they had meant to me, and at the end I told you that I hoped you would be happy, and that I knew you wanted me to be happy, too. Now I’m not so sure, about either part. The thought of you being happy with her tightens my chest with almost unbearable sorrow, and it’s increasingly clear that you don’t want me to be happy at all. This feels more like torture, as if you want me to be punished.
The idea sets something off inside me, a violent reverberation of unease. I can’t help remembering the last time I saw you; the way I turned and left you standing there, the sight of you standing motionless by the side of the road when I looked back. I’ve never been able to widen out that picture, to let myself wholly remember. I walked away and didn’t look back again. I pushed down the guilt and the pain, smothered it into submission out of sheer desperation. I know you couldn’t have done the same. You’ve had to live it, and I have no idea how it might have changed you.
It’s half past two and I’ve been out for hours. Forcing myself to stand up, I start to make my way back across the park. I turn on to the road that leads back to the house and hurry along, hugging my jacket to my body and shivering in the cold spring wind.
Lost in my thoughts, I am only vaguely conscious of the noise behind me – a rush of sound, a squeal of brakes. And then it’s right there, in a split second of violent colour. A car veering too close to the pavement – cutting so close to me that I feel a shudder of semi-contact, my force field bristling in sudden shock, before it swings away again and zooms off up the street. I fling myself back against the hedge. The car is already out of sight, but my mind and body haven’t quite caught up. It was close. Very close. I’m bending down, my legs weak, and crouching at the side of the road, ducking my head between my knees and struggling to talk myself down.
It must be five minutes before I manage to straighten up and walk on. I tell myself not to be stupid. It was a moment in time, with no significance. It means nothing.
By the time I’m back at Everdene Avenue, it has started to rain lightly and I put up the collar of my coat and duck my head down. If Amber is looking out of her window, then she’ll still recognize me at once. But there’s no swinging front door, no plaintive call across the street, and I quickly unlock the door of number 21 and slip inside.
My heart lifts with relief when I see the note scrawled on white paper in the middle of the kitchen table. Gone to supermarket to pick up some stuff and might swing by the cinema on the way back to see if there’s anything on this evening that we might fancy seeing. Back by four. F. At least I have another hour or so to collect my thoughts. But I can’t seem to settle for long, and before I know it I’m prowling restlessly through the house once again, going from room to room and staring at the barely there possessions – searching for any clue as to how you live, what you’re like, what you care about now.
The more I cycle through the faceless rooms, the more my helplessness grows. This is pointless; I have already done this search, back when I found the aftershave bottle. There’s only one place I failed to look: the little cabinet under the desk in the study, which was locked. At the time, I let it go, but now the conviction grips me that I need to look inside. I hurry to the study, cross to the empty desk and drop to my knees beside it. I tug at the drawer, but of course it’s still locked. I peer underneath, run my hands across the floor in search of a key, then I look around the rest of the room, meticulously combing every nook and cranny I can find. The key isn’t there.