The Other Woman(66)

I shrugged my shoulders. I couldn’t care less.

He looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘You need to look at the bigger picture here. We can get married anytime. Mum might not be here for much longer.’

‘Exactly, that’s why you made the wrong call,’ I said. ‘We should have got married so your mum could be there.’

‘Maybe so, but what’s happened has happened, and we need to get through it, together.’

‘So, how is Pammie doing?’ I said, ignoring his veiled plea.

‘She’s doing okay, thanks,’ he said, a hint of sarcasm in his voice. ‘We went to her first chemo last week and she’s got another one coming up.’

I felt like I’d been hit by a ten-tonne truck. ‘We?’

He nodded. ‘Yeah, I took her to hospital last Monday. I just wanted to make sure she was okay. You’d do the same for your mum, Em, you know you would.’

I was struggling to get my head round this. He’d gone with her? To a fictitious appointment? How the hell had she pulled that off?

‘It’s so harrowing what they have to go through,’ he went on. ‘Mum’s after-effects aren’t too bad at the moment, she feels a bit sick and she’s really tired, but she’s been told to expect it to get worse as time goes on.’ He rubbed his eyes. ‘Honestly, you wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.’

I was so shocked that I didn’t even have the wherewithal to reach forward and give him a reassuring hand. For the first time since her ‘announcement’ I began to wonder if it could actually be true. The heat of the realization crept up from my toes to my neck, sending a flush across my cheeks. I surreptitiously shrugged my coat off in an effort to cool down.

It hadn’t occurred to me for a second that she’d been telling the truth. I thought about how that would make me look. How my recent behaviour would be perceived by those around me. I was banking on her lies being uncovered. For her to be revealed as the cruel fraud she was. But what if it was all true?

‘What’s it like in there?’ I managed. ‘The hospital, I mean.’ I had to be sure he was saying what I thought he was saying.

‘They make it as comfortable as they can for the patients,’ he said, my heart sinking with every syllable. ‘There are a few other women in the room, you know, all having the same thing, which helps Mum, ’cause you know what she’s like, not one to keep herself to herself.’ He smiled. ‘So it’s good for her to be able to chat, to find out what might be around the corner, to prepare herself for whatever it may be. It also helps her to realize that she’s not on her own, which I think is the most important thing.’

He bowed his head. ‘It’s not looking too good though, Em,’ he said, before his shoulders caved in and shuddered with the rise and fall of his chest.

I moved round to his side of the table and slid along the bench to reach him. He sobbed as I put my arm around him, then grabbed my hand tightly and brought it up to his mouth. ‘I love you,’ he whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Ssh, it’s okay.’ I was at a loss as to what else to say. I’d spent such a long time with the thoughts in my own head, going over the unfairness of it all, and the conspiracy I felt Pammie had been orchestrating since the day she met me, that I’d not thought about how Adam was feeling. I’d just written him off as a fool, a lesser man for allowing himself to be duped. But that wasn’t how he was feeling; he was bereft. He’d cancelled his wedding to the woman he loved, and he believed, for he had no reason not to, that his mother was dying.

‘It’s probably not the best place to have had this conversation,’ I said, half laughing, as we watched commuters rushing by the window.

‘No, probably not,’ he agreed, before turning to me and placing a wet kiss on my forehead. ‘Will you come and see Mum? She really wants to see you, believe it or not, to say how sorry she is.’

Despite myself, I pulled back a little. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, no longer in control of my thoughts, or how they played out on my lips.

‘Please, it would mean the world to her – to us both.’

I nodded. ‘Okay. Maybe.’

‘She’s got chemo again next Wednesday, your day off. Maybe you could drive down and meet us afterwards? Unless, of course, I can come back home and we can drive down together?’

I wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Instead of easing the swarm of thoughts in my head, Adam’s revelation that he was going to the hospital with Pammie only served to feed them, making them buzz and whirr away until they throbbed at my temples.





33

It wasn’t Adam being back home that had given me this excruciating headache. It was the pressure of going to see Pammie that was stressing me out. I could literally feel the tightness working its way across my shoulders and creeping up into my neck.

I instinctively opened the fridge to get a bottle of wine, but stopped short. Alcohol had gone a long way to numbing my nerve endings, but I couldn’t rely on it as a crutch forever. I needed to stand on my own and be in tune with my brain and body, to really feel what it was feeling, rather than exist in the misty cloud of depression and detachment that had enveloped me for a fortnight.

I looked longingly at the bottle of Sauvignon Blanc, chilled to perfection. Pippa must have brought it with her when she came round for dinner on Sunday night, though to think that it had lived long enough to tell the tale was a miracle. I hadn’t intended to drink then, either, but when I told her I’d seen Adam, she demanded to come over to get all the details.