The Light Over London(59)

“After he lost his job, it became worse. We’d bought the house and we were relying on my income to pay the mortgage and everything else. Yes, it was a tough market, but after a while I realized he wasn’t looking for a job. I got suspicious that he always seemed to be meeting some uni friend or another and I’d cross-check our credit card bills. Turns out that when I was at work, he was eating at expensive restaurants or going to his club. Tennis matches, rounds of golf, days at Lord’s, poker tournaments. He spent one afternoon racing vintage Morgans in the Malvern Hills. That set us back a couple thousand pounds, plus another thousand for bets he lost.”

Liam winced. “Did you know?”

Cara sighed and pinched the bridge of her nose. “I knew about some of it, but not as much as I should’ve. I was working more than I’ve ever worked in my life to bill as many hours as possible because I told myself that was the only way we’d stay solvent. The truth is, I wanted to work. I knew we were drifting apart, and it was easier to stay away than to deal with that.”

She crossed her arms over her stomach. Thinking about the whole mess never failed to make her feel like a fool. She’d known that Simon liked to keep up appearances, but she’d thought it was simple male competitiveness, never once believing he was capable of putting them on the path to a level of debt that would’ve meant bankruptcy if she hadn’t stopped it. She’d been played, but she’d had all the evidence in front of her. She’d let it happen.

“One afternoon, I couldn’t ignore it anymore,” she said. “I’d come home from work early with a migraine. Simon was passed out on the sofa, a bottle of gin next to him, and his phone was dinging with messages from friends wondering where he was. He’d promised to show for a high-stakes poker game but had gotten too drunk.

“I don’t know why that was what made me snap, but I went straight up to his office and began going through his records. I found seven credit cards in both of our names that I’d never seen before, all of them at or near their limit. Overdraft notices. Casino receipts and IOUs for private gambling debts. There were unpaid bills for the utilities and the mortgage. I opened up our joint account and realized that he’d been pulling money out in increasingly large increments every week. I hadn’t noticed before, because he’d taken over paying the bills, since he wasn’t working and had more time.

“When he was sober enough to talk later that evening, I told him I knew everything and wanted an explanation. He became defensive, and when I asked him if he had a problem with gambling and drinking, he denied it.” She snuck a glance at Liam, who looked straight ahead, his hands tight on the wheel. “That night he snuck out of the house. When I woke up that morning, he still hadn’t come back. I went into his email and found the receipt for a car-hire app. He’d gone to the Park Tower Casino in Knightsbridge.”

“Was that what did it?” Liam asked.

She laughed. “No, of course not. There were four more months of fighting and crying and him promising to get help, but I would come home and find him drunk and passed out. Then a drunk driver hit my parents. I got the call from the hospital that they were in critical condition. They died before I could get there.

“The day after the funeral, I went to my solicitor’s office and filed for divorce.” It wasn’t the entire story, but it was as much as she was willing to tell him right now. Even this had wrung her out.

“As a condition of the divorce, I paid off Simon’s debts and he walked away from everything else. The house, the cars, the furniture.”

“The things we just saw in storage,” Liam guessed.

“Yes. I just wanted to close the door on it all.”

“I can understand that,” he said.

“Is that what you did when you found out about Vivian and your best friend?” she asked softly.

It was his turn to laugh. “I didn’t just walk away, remember? I moved my whole life out of the country. I arrived in Oregon in the early summer and locked myself in my office and in the archives, researching an article for an academic journal I’d been invited to submit to. I spent most of that time in a fog.”

She nodded, the feeling so familiar. “I think I spent the six months after my parents died in a fugue state. There are so many things I can’t remember doing, even though they’re on my calendar.”

“And you do everything you can to convince yourself that it’s normal, you’re normal, until one day you sort of crack. It was four months after I moved when I came home and found a package on my front doorstep. It was a bread machine from an old friend from uni and his wife that was meant as a wedding gift. Apparently Vivian had missed them when she was calling around to tell people the wedding was off, and they’d tracked me down in Reed thinking that we’d love the surprise. I opened it and the next thing I knew I was ugly-crying on the laminate floor of my rental kitchen.”

“That’s terrible,” she said.

He shrugged. “I don’t know. They were so mortified when they found out that they refused to let me return the bread machine. I had fresh bread whenever I wanted for two years until I moved back to Barlow and had to leave it behind.”

She cocked her head to the side. “The wrong kind of plug?”

“Exactly,” he said.

“That moment happened to me in a Waitrose. I picked up a bag of granola because I knew we were running low in the pantry, and I realized there was no more ‘we’ and that I hate granola and that I never had to buy it again.”