The First Mistake(72)

Alice stops buttoning up her shirt. He’d stayed over? So it couldn’t have been Tom. But as fast as her brain wants to grab onto the tiniest semblance of hope, it removes itself from her grasp just as quickly, as she acknowledges that Tom had often been away with work. She laughs wryly at the memory of him going backwards and forwards to Dublin, in a supposed attempt to win new business. Had the client even existed? Had the whole set-up been an elaborate ruse to be with Beth?

She pictures Tom kissing her and Sophia goodbye at the front door, with his overnight holdall in his hand.

‘I wish I didn’t have to do this,’ he’d say.

‘So do I, but it’ll be good for business,’ Alice would reply. ‘So go make it worth our while.’

He’d look back at them forlornly, like a lamb going to slaughter, and Alice used to feel a little piece of her heart break each time. Now, she wonders, how long it had taken him to get his game face on and get round to Beth’s. She imagines it was only a matter of minutes.

Alice does all that she can not to blanch when Nathan takes her hand as they walk down to breakfast. He sits down and orders a coffee whilst Alice heads to the buffet that is laid out along one wall of the huge room. She’s debating between fruit or cereal when a male voice behind her says, ‘I missed you last night.’

Taking her time to turn around, assuming that whoever it is must be talking to someone else, her mouth drops open and a thousand words crowd the space in her brain as she’s faced with a uniformed pilot. He looks like the man from a dream she thinks she’s had.

‘I’m sorry . . .’ she starts, without really knowing where she’s going with it.

‘Don’t be,’ he says, smiling. ‘It happens all the time. I get stood up by beautiful women every night of the week.’

Somehow, she doubts that. ‘I’m not here on my own,’ she says, feeling like a schoolgirl caught playing truant.

‘I know,’ he says, his eyes avoiding hers as he picks up what looks like granola in a glass pot. ‘I saw you walking in with your husband.’

Alice’s cheeks flush and her pulse quickens as she scans the room, desperately trying to remember where they’d been seated.

‘Anyway, it was very nice to meet you,’ says the pilot. ‘And good luck with that venture of yours.’ He continues along the buffet without missing a beat.

Her heart’s done exactly the opposite as she sees Nathan heading towards her.

‘What are you having, sweetheart?’ he asks, as he literally rubs shoulders with the man Alice could have had sex with last night.

She could have done, perhaps should have done, but she hadn’t. Nathan, on the other hand, most probably had, as he certainly wasn’t in the bar where he claimed to have been. Yet, he was only gone for an hour or so. Would that have given him enough time? If the woman who proclaimed to ‘need him, now’ was waiting in a room down the corridor, then it gave him plenty.

Alice can’t help but scan the room as she walks back to the table, picking out any lonesome woman and assessing whether she might have had sex with her husband last night. There are disappointingly few possibilities, but it doesn’t stop Alice fawning over Nathan, just in case they’re being watched.

She puts her hand on his as they talk, careful to give him her full attention. He, in turn, seems to give her his, which confuses her. Why would he do that if he knows his mistress is there, watching?

‘Looking forward to going home?’ he asks, as she leans in for a kiss. He doesn’t flinch.

‘It will be good to see the girls,’ she says.

‘Has it been as hard as you thought it would be? Coming away? Leaving them at home?’

‘Actually, no,’ she says, honestly. She imagines that’s probably because she’s had other things to think about.

‘It would be nice if we could do this again,’ he says. ‘Perhaps a little more often. If last night was anything to go by, I’d like to do it a lot more often.’

She remembers their love-making before she’d seen his phone; the warm tingle of alcohol making her lose her inhibitions, the sense of abandonment as she finally cast off the shackles of the past, content to give her all to the husband who deserved it. The words of the text flash in her mind and it hits her again, hard, that he doesn’t.

‘It’s funny,’ she says, watching his reaction carefully, ‘but this time yesterday, I was so excited about this project.’

His brow furrows. ‘And now?’

‘Now, I don’t feel like I want to do it.’

‘But what’s changed in that time?’

Everything, she wants to say. ‘Nothing,’ she says instead. ‘I just don’t want to do it.’

Nathan sits back in his chair and laughs. ‘Well, it’s a bit late to change your mind.’

‘Is it?’ she asks, tilting her head to one side. ‘What if I wanted to pull out?’

He runs a hand through his hair. ‘Well, you can’t . . . we’ve exchanged. We’d lose the hundred grand deposit.’

‘But losing one hundred thousand would surely be better than losing a million?’ she says.

He picks up her hand and holds it to his lips. Any notion of his mistress being in the room evaporates. ‘I understand why you’re nervous, it’s only natural, but it will be okay.’