The First Mistake(32)

Had the best lunch in Verbier today. ‘Potence’ (flame-grilled meat) and a cheese fondue. Going to make this part of my staple diet when I get back home!

There’s a photo of a medieval-looking device, alight with flaming chunks of meat hanging from it. Underneath, Tom had written the caption:

Life is good!

‘Life was good,’ I correct him.

How could he possibly have known that within a few hours his would be over? I brush away tears as I look at when it was posted. The night before he died would have been 25 February 2009.

My blood runs cold as I read the date. 22 June 2018.

Today.





13


‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I say as I rush into the gym cafe the following morning.

‘You okay?’ asks Beth, with a concerned expression.

I thought I’d done a pretty good job of concealing the bags weighing my eyes down, and hoped that lashings of mascara would have disguised their red rims. I’d eventually fallen asleep on the couch and have vague recollections of Nathan helping me into bed in the small hours. He’d held me as I silently cried.

‘The last twenty-four hours have been . . . well . . .’ I can’t even finish the sentence because I don’t know what to say. Should I start with us not getting the Japan job and Nathan wanting to buy it and do it ourselves? Or should I skip straight to the part where the ghost of my former husband is seemingly posting on Facebook?

‘What’s happened?’ asks Beth.

‘I’ve had a problem with the car this morning,’ is all I feel confident enough to say without breaking down. It’s not a lie.

‘Oh,’ is all she says.

I force a smile. ‘Yeah, I woke up to two flat tyres, so I had to call Range Rover out and they ended up putting it on a truck and taking it away. Not a great start to my morning.’

‘And I bet new tyres don’t come cheap.’

‘Exactly.’

‘From the look of you, I thought you were going to say something had happened with Nathan. How did that go? Is everything okay?’

‘Mmm,’ I mumble, for fear that if I say any real words, my thin veneer will crack.

‘So, was he able to justify his actions?’ she presses. ‘Did you hit him with everything you had?’

I nod. ‘He says he’s not having an affair.’

‘Well, I could have told you that much,’ she says, her features pinched. ‘When will these men take ownership of their actions? When will the women who sleep with married men hold their hands up for the part they play? They all think they can do what they like, regardless of who it hurts, but there has to be consequences. They have to be ready for that.’

Her eyes drift off and I imagine her picturing her ex with his new girlfriend, wondering if they’re even aware of the pain they’ve caused.

‘It’s a good job I believe in karma,’ she says. ‘What goes around, comes around. Somehow or other they’ll pay.’

I force a smile, wondering what purpose that serves if the damage has already been done.

‘You want to believe him, don’t you?’ she asks, looking at me.

‘Of course,’ I say. I don’t know what to believe anymore, is what I mean.

I want to tell her about Tom being on Facebook. I can’t stop thinking about it, imagining him out there, living a life without us. The thought is totally incomprehensible, yet I’d rather it be true than the Facebook Support Team being right when they said it must just be a technical glitch.

‘I’m afraid there are one thousand and forty-five Tom Evanses on the site,’ their operative had said last night.

But only one of them is presumably dead, I’d wanted to say.

‘Is there nothing you can do?’ I’d pleaded instead. ‘Can you at least tell me where this Tom Evans, my Tom Evans, is posting from?’

‘For reasons of confidentiality, we’re unable to do that,’ he’d said. ‘Have you tried contacting him directly?’

I couldn’t say no. That would just make me look insane. Why would I have contacted them to ask where he was, before asking him? But that’s what I’d done – because I was too scared to go the other route, too terrified that I might get a reply.

‘Did you hear back on Japan?’ Beth asks now, and I’m grateful to her for changing the subject.

‘We didn’t get it. The developer pulled out of buying the site.’

‘I’m sorry – you really wanted that, didn’t you?’

I nod. ‘So much so that Nathan almost convinced me that we should buy it and build it ourselves.’

‘Wow,’ she says, looking at me in awe. ‘Are you going to?’

I shake my head. ‘No, AT Designs means too much to me. It was created by Tom and me, and if anything happened to it because of a bad decision I made, I’d feel I’d let him down in the worst possible way.’

I think back to how hard we’d both worked to get the company off the ground, even when Tom was still holding down a full-time job as a civil engineer.

It had long been a dream of mine to start my own interiors company and just after we found out I was pregnant with Sophia, Tom convinced me that it was time to turn it into a reality. I put my card in shop windows, dropped leaflets, designed a website; anything to get my name out there.