One Small Mistake(70)

‘Don’t you worry about me, love. Trish will take good care of me,’ she said. ‘You just look after your dad, okay?’

At home, I was greeted with a familiar noise: the burr of the hoover. Strange since it wasn’t in my hand. I stepped into the lounge to see the rarest of sights: my husband in his relaxed weekend garb, enthusiastically hoovering with his wireless headphones on, singing an off-key rendition of ‘Wild Thing’ by The Troggs, and I felt a squeeze of affection for him.

Sensing my presence, he looked over and his face split into a smile to match my own. He turned off the hoover and removed his headphones. ‘Hello, gorgeous.’

Gorgeous. He called me gorgeous when we started dating. As soon as we married though, I became ‘darling’, which I’m sure he saw as an upgrade because that’s what his father calls his mother, but it makes me feel middle-aged. ‘Who’s the murder victim?’

He frowned. ‘What?’

‘You’re cleaning, which means you’ve either had a stroke or you’re covering up a crime.’

‘Oh har-har,’ he said. ‘I know you’ve been under a lot of stress recently, so I thought I’d help out.’ He brandished the hoover nozzle. ‘Do some cleaning.’

‘I like it.’

‘Yeah?’

I sashayed over to him. ‘Nothing gets me wetter than a man with a hoover in his hand.’

‘Oh really?’ He raised his eyebrows. ‘Well then, you should see what I can do with a mop.’

He wound an arm around my waist and pulled me to him, ‘Wild Thing’ still playing through the discarded headphones on the coffee table. He kissed me. I know you’d roll your eyes and say something like, ‘Running the hoover round once in a blue moon doesn’t mean you owe your husband a quickie on the sofa,’ but this was Ethan really trying. So I let him fuck me over the arm of our custom-made sofa, and when he’d all but skipped upstairs for a shower, cleaning forgotten, I picked up the hoover and finished the lounge.

‘What’s this?’ The voice at my back was so gravelly, it took me a moment to realise it belonged to Ethan.

I turned around and stared at the little packet squeezed between his fingers. My contraceptive pills. You’d ramble and babble like you always do when you’re caught out. I, on the other hand, go cold and hard like stone, so I stared at my husband and said, ‘You know what it is.’

‘I thought we’d stopped using protection.’

‘We had. Then I changed my mind and started taking it again.’ I lifted my chin. ‘Why were you going through my drawers?’

‘I was putting away laundry.’ He shook the packet and the pills rattled in their foil prison. He was so very angry with me. ‘Why’re you taking them again?’

I could’ve lied, maybe I should’ve, but I’d spent so much time pretending to other people, I wanted to be honest with my husband. ‘You’re never here. You’re always working. If we had a baby, I’d be the one taking care of it all by myself.’

‘That’s your fucking job.’

I inhaled sharply. ‘Excuse me?’

‘I’m not discussing this,’ he said. ‘Get rid of the pills. All of them.’

I was angry and I was caught, but mostly, I was angry. ‘You never discuss things with me. You simply lay down the law and expect me to follow it. Talk to me.’

‘Fine. Okay. What do you do with your day, Ada? You cook and clean and throw parties. It’s time your life had some purpose. Some direction.’

I knew that’s what other people thought of me – my friends who have children, my friends who don’t have children but do have careers, maybe even you think that of me – but I didn’t ever dream that my husband felt the same way. It hurt. It really hurt. But it’s what I wanted, isn’t it? I asked for a confrontation and now I had it.

‘This is our deal.’ He was bubbling with self-righteousness and fury. ‘I work. You organise the house and have the fucking baby.’

‘Our marriage isn’t one of your business deals, Ethan.’

‘A marriage is a contract. Of course it’s a fucking deal. Since your counselling sessions, you’ve changed. I thought if I did some mindless chores you’d lighten up.’

It stung that his sudden desire to help me was really only to help himself.

‘You always act strangely with me after those counselling sessions,’ he barked. ‘I don’t know what she’s putting in your head, but I don’t want you to go anymore.’

‘It was your idea.’

‘Well, it stops here.’

‘I’m not one of your interns. You can’t make demands and expect me to obey.’

‘No, you’re not one of my interns. They’re free. You cost me a fucking fortune.’

I wanted to slap him. ‘Ask me again why I don’t want children with you.’

He tossed the packet of pills onto the table before storming upstairs.

I made to go after him, but my phone rang. I ignored Ruby’s call because I didn’t need an update on what size of fruit her baby was or if it had very cleverly grown fingernails this week. But then she sent me a message begging me to call her back. Curiosity piqued, I rang. She told me she’d just seen our dad stumbling towards town.