Someone Else's Shoes(117)

“I—I can’t come back.” She shakes her head. “It’s not a good place for me any more. Not with . . .” Her voice tails away.

He considers this. His mouth purses at the corners and he nods. “We can still see each other at boxing, though, right?”

Across the café a couple are dandling a baby on the father’s knee. Its head wobbles with mirth as the mother blows raspberries at it.

“I don’t know.” She wants so badly to take his hand. She curls her fingers through the handle of the mug, so that she cannot do it without thinking. “I don’t know what’s happening with my marriage. But I have to try and I—I can’t—this thing—” She holds her coffee mug tighter. “I don’t think I can see you any more. I need to feel like a good person and this . . . this makes me feel good, but it doesn’t make me feel like a good person. Does that make sense?”

And it’s out there. The thing she has rolled through her head in her sleepless nights. An acknowledgment that there is something between them, and that whatever it is cannot continue. The only thing she has been able to hang on to is the sense that she can somehow be a good person again. She meets his gaze. It is sad and understanding, and makes something in her turn over.

“Are you . . . back together?”

“No. I don’t know.” She sighs. “We’ve been married a long time. It’s hard to just—I mean, he’s not a bad man. It’s hard to walk away from all that history without a backward look. I don’t know. Maybe he already has. Maybe I need to be by myself and work out who I am without him. It’s just hard when I’ve never really been . . . without him.” They sit for a moment. “It’s complicated, isn’t it?”

He nods. “It really is.”

“I thought I’d have it all figured out by this age.”

He lets out a short laugh. And then he looks serious again. “I hope he appreciates you, Sam. You’re . . . you’re special.”

“I’m not. Not really. You’re probably better off with someone less . . . complicated. But thank you. For giving me . . .”

He leans forward in his seat then and reaches across the table, his palm resting gently against the side of her face. He kisses her lightly and, just for a moment, lets his forehead rest against hers, so that she can feel the warmth of his skin, their breath mingling in the space between them. They stay like that, oblivious to the gurgle of the coffee machine, the scraping of chairs and the sounds of the baby beside them, and she hears what she thinks might be a sigh.

Sam places her hand over his, and gently brings it down from her face, leaning back slowly in her chair. She gazes at his hand in hers and turns it over, surveying the scarred knuckles, the nails a few shades lighter than his skin. When she looks up, the smile they give each other is sad and true, and filled with the things neither of them can say.

Joel breaks the moment. He squeezes her hand briefly, then stands, releasing it. She is not sure what she can read on his face: pride? Disappointment? Resignation? He turns and, without saying anything else, takes his jacket from the back of the chair, nods to her, and leaves.



* * *



? ? ?

Sam drives the camper-van along the narrow street to her house, and parks at the front, noting that the builders have finally finished the adjoining wall. She needs to pick up more clothes for her and Cat, who seems to get through three outfit changes a day. They will move back in tomorrow once Nisha has sorted things out with Carl. But in the moments she allows herself to think about it, she doesn’t know how she will feel about staying in this house. It still holds, in the unmoving air, the echo of the break-in, the occasional tiny crunch of something broken underfoot and lodged deep in the carpet. When she closes her eyes she sees the devastation of her little home; it wakes her up at night. “At least you have the terrifying guard dog,” Andrea had said, looking at Kevin, legs splayed and snoring on her floor.

Not for the first time, Sam feels the loss of her old life like a wound. The world is full of lasts, she thinks. The last time you pick up your child. The last time you hug a parent. The last time you cook dinner in a house full of the people you love. The last time you make love to the husband you once adored who will walk away from you because you turned into a crazy, resentful hormone-fueled idiot. And with all these moments you don’t know that this will be the last or you would be overwhelmed by the poignancy of them, hang on to them like someone unhinged, bury your face in them, never let them go. Sam thinks about the last time she curled herself around Phil’s body. If she had known it would be the last time would she have done things differently? Would she have been more patient? Less angry? If she thinks about the possibility that she will never hold him again, a hole opens up in her middle that leaves her feeling like she might just disintegrate.

In for six, hold for three, out for seven.

Sam steels herself as she reaches the front door. What would Nisha do? She would toughen up, be practical, strategize. So, she will head to John Lewis and replace the broken items tomorrow. At least there will be money coming in again in a month’s time. She’ll live off credit till then. Perhaps at some point she may even have a little over to help Andrea. She flinches as she hears a sound from inside and stops in her tracks, slowly peers around the door, her heart racing. Carl Cantor’s men. Her heart thumps all the way up in her throat. She feels a fine sweat break out on her skin.