The First Mistake(62)

My head fell into my hands. ‘I don’t know where he lives.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know where he lives?’ she asked coldly. ‘You’ve been seeing him for months.’

‘I’ve never been to his place,’ I admitted.

She threw her arms up in the air before taking herself off and circling around the kitchen, deep in thought.

I knew the question was coming, even before she asked it.

‘So, where does he work then?’ she said eventually.

‘He didn’t have an office. He could work from anywhere – as long as he had his mobile phone.’

‘And you thought that all this made him seem like a good bet?’ she asked, her voice rising. ‘I honestly can’t believe what I’m hearing.’

Her disappointment in me was palpable, which hurt so much more than my broken heart, or the stolen money.

I remembered the last time I’d disappointed her. I was fourteen and she’d found a cigarette in the pocket of my school blazer. I’d wanted her to ground me. I’d wanted her to scream at me. But all she said was, You’ve let me down. It was the worst possible punishment and I vowed I’d never disappoint her again. And I hadn’t, not until today.

‘I will fix this,’ I said, a sudden fury bursting out of me. How dare he come into my life like a wrecking ball, destroying everything I hold dear?

Mum fell down dejectedly onto a chair. ‘And how do you intend to do that?’

Despite everything, I foolishly believed that she would find the solution. Like she always had. In my mind, she was the adult and I was the child, so I naively hadn’t expected the question and the onus to fall to me.

‘I will not let him get away with this,’ I said. ‘I will track him down and make him pay for what he’s done.’

Mum sat there, sadly shaking her head. ‘It could have been worse,’ she said, in barely more than a whisper. ‘There could have been children involved.’

I pictured myself doubled up over the toilet, and suddenly wondered why I’d not realized that I was five days late. I instinctively touched my tummy, desperately trying to drown out the voice that said, Maybe there are.





PART 3



Present Day – Alice and Beth





30


Alice feels a churning in her stomach as she prepares to get out of the car. Her mum had done the school run for the past five days, as Alice had taken to her bed with a supposed virus. Nobody need know that she was in the midst of despair, devastated by the revelation that her beloved Tom had been having an affair. That he’d fathered a child with her best friend.

She checks her reflection in the rear-view mirror, barely able to recognize her sallow skin and sunken cheekbones.

‘Okay Olivia, let’s go,’ she enthuses as much as she can.

The pair of them walk quickly, Alice with her head down and Olivia skipping to keep up.

‘You’re giving me a stitch,’ she moans.

Alice catches sight of Beth’s car parked up ahead and thinks about turning back. I can’t do this, she says to herself. But Livvy needs to go to school, she counters in her own mind as she forces herself to keep walking.

‘We need to talk,’ a voice says, as Alice draws level with Beth’s old Volkswagen.

Alice tugs on Olivia’s hand and breaks into a half run.

‘Alice, please,’ calls Beth, a little louder. ‘We can’t pretend this isn’t happening.’

‘That’s exactly what we’re going to do,’ says Alice, under her breath.

It’s the only way she can bear to get up in the morning, because if she acknowledges the facts – that her dead husband and best friend betrayed her in the worst possible way – she is terrified of the damage it will do.

It didn’t matter that Beth might not have known Tom was married. It didn’t matter that she and Beth didn’t even know each other then. The sense of deceitfulness still punctured her lungs, making her feel as if she can’t breathe.

‘This isn’t going to go away,’ says Beth as she catches up with Alice and Olivia.

The little girl looks up at her mum, puzzled as to why she’s not listening to Beth.

‘You’re being very rude,’ she says. ‘Millie’s mummy wants to talk to you.’

It’s only then that Alice stops, dead in her tracks, and turns to face the woman who has taken away everything she knew to be true. She knows that Millie is standing beside Beth, but she cannot allow herself to look at her for fear that she will suddenly see Tom so clearly in her features that she will cry out. A very real pain is piercing her heart.

‘Thank you,’ says Beth calmly. The seconds stretch out like hours as the two women look at each other for the first time since Beth’s admission. As soon as Alice had come round from her blackout, she’d insisted on getting up and driving home, despite the first aider at the gym telling her to stay where she was. For a moment, she thought she’d had the weirdest dream, but Beth’s face peering into her bubble, like an ugly caricature, jolted her back into the real world. Alice had had to get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible, as panic descended on her. She couldn’t remember how she’d got home or what anyone had said to her over the ensuing days. She had just laid in bed, with her head under the duvet, unhearing and unseeing as she grappled with the scale of the deception that had befallen her.