An Unwanted Guest(31)

She gets up and walks over and sits down by the fire. The sweater is beneath her. No one is showing any interest in her. She can hear, faintly, James and Bradley rattling around in the kitchen.

Beverly feels quietly around in the sweater until she finds Henry’s mobile phone and closes her hand around it. She slips it into her own pocket. She doesn’t want to look at it here, in front of everyone. And she doesn’t want her husband to come back in from the woodshed and find her in his seat.

She gets up and moves around restlessly, as if looking for a new magazine among the ones in the lobby. Maybe Henry won’t notice that his mobile is missing for a while. They’ve got the torch, and he wouldn’t be looking at his phone otherwise, since there’s no coverage. She only wants to see his old messages. If he misses it, he won’t have any particular reason to believe she has it. She has her own phone with the torch app.

She clutches it inside her pocket. She tells herself not to hope for too much; she has no idea what his password is.

Henry and David come in with their first armfuls of wood and drop them by the hearth. David tosses another log onto the fire. Sparks fly up in a shower and then he prods at it with the iron poker to get the fire going again. Then they leave for more wood. Her husband hadn’t even looked at her.

‘I’m going to go back up to my room for a bit,’ Beverly says.

Lauren suggests to Ian, ‘Maybe we should go up, too.’ She picks up her book from the little table at the end of the sofa.

It seems as if no one really wants to stay in the lobby any longer, Beverly thinks. They are already tiring of one another. She walks towards the staircase, eager to slip into the privacy of her room to see if she can access her husband’s phone. As she turns on the landing, she looks down and sees Gwen nudging Riley up, too.

It doesn’t take Beverly long to get to her room on the first floor, lighting her way with her own mobile phone. She opens the door with her key and closes it behind her.

She sits down on the bed in the gloomy room and pulls her husband’s mobile out of her pocket and looks at it. She’s seen him use his phone countless times. And he always does the same thing with his index finger – two quick swipes down, one across. Inspired, she tries the obvious, a capital H, for Henry. But it doesn’t work. She thinks hard about the last time she saw him using his phone and realizes he must have changed the password. He wouldn’t do that unless he has something to hide. She stares at the phone, frustrated. She tries different combinations of numbers but gets nowhere. Then she moves her finger in a capital T pattern, for Teddy, her husband’s favourite child, and the phone opens. For a moment, she’s exhilarated. She thinks what a fool her husband can be, and how frequently he underestimates her.

She quickly goes through his emails but there’s nothing but work emails, long and boring; if he’s hidden a mistress in there, she’ll never find her. Then she looks at the texts. She starts from the top of the list, ignoring names of people she knows, but then she sees a woman’s name she doesn’t recognize. She clicks on it and opens the text; there is a picture of her. Beverly’s heart almost stops. She starts at the bottom, with the most recent text, and works her way backwards.

Idk. I have to go away this weekend with the nag.

When will I see you again?



The nag. That is what he calls her to his girlfriend. A wave of hurt swells inside her. She knows she nags him and the kids. She nags them because they don’t listen. If they did what was expected of them the first time she wouldn’t have to nag. But the word nag also makes her think of an old, broken-down mare – whiskered, swaybacked, and ugly. She fights tears and continues reading.

I miss you terribly!

Do you miss me?



Attached to the text is a picture of her, topless, with a shameless grin. Beverly stares at the photo, shocked to her core. She’s young, and gorgeous. A home-wrecker. She knows nothing about life at all.

She can’t imagine what this girl sees in her husband. If she’s after money she’s going to be disappointed. He’s not going to have any left when she’s done with him, Beverly thinks furiously. And then she stops herself, takes a deep breath.

She’s not going to divorce him. Surely this is just a temporary infatuation, a midlife fling. He’s made a mistake. A mistake that they can recover from. She doesn’t want to lose him. She needs him.

She tabs up quickly through the rest of the texts to the beginning of the thread, anxious to see how long this has been going on. Only about a month. He met her at a bar.

She’s married to a cliché.

Well, now she knows.

Her finger itches to send a text of her own to this bitch. But she hesitates. And then she remembers there’s no coverage here anyway. Just as well. Finally she drops the mobile back in her pocket. She’s going to hurry back downstairs and slip it back into her husband’s sweater until she decides what to do. She must handle this the right way. She opens the door to the hall.





Chapter Sixteen


Saturday, 2:20 PM


MATTHEW SITS ALONE in his first-floor room, the lunch tray that Bradley brought on the side table untouched. He desperately needs to talk to his father, but he has no way to reach him. His father would know what to do. He’s always good in a crisis.

Matthew rises from his chair and goes restlessly to the window. He looks out at the icy landscape below. He can’t drive in that. He couldn’t possibly get back to New York City. And even if he could, how would it look – if he fled before the police arrived?