The Secret Wife(10)

Her mother’s oft-repeated view that writing was a hobby, not a reliable way to earn a living, kept echoing in her head. She’d wanted Kitty to study law, but memorising all those endless judgements sounded unbearably tedious. Should she have listened? Or should she push herself harder to succeed as a writer? There seemed no urgency when Tom earned enough for them both. She kept planning to write a book but changed her mind about the subject before managing more than a few thousand words. If she couldn’t maintain an interest, how could she expect to hold her readers’ attention?

‘You’ve always had a lazy streak,’ her mum used to say. ‘You get it from your dad’s side.’ Perhaps it was true.

She wondered what kind of books Dmitri Yakovlevich had written. She vaguely remembered that Grandma Marta had Russian roots; the surname certainly sounded Russian: perhaps his work was all in his native language. She’d find out when the royalty statements came through.

There was nothing that seemed suspicious in the Inheritance Tracker forms so she signed on the dotted line and sent them back with the required certificates. She and Tom vaguely discussed what to do with the cabin in upstate New York, and he was in favour of selling it.



‘After it’s lain empty for thirty-odd years, the level of repairs needed to make it habitable would cost more than the thing is worth,’ he said with his business head.

‘It might be a good investment,’ Kitty maintained. ‘We could renovate then rent it out through a local agency.’ She had a flair for DIY. Her father had taught her carpentry skills and she had already done up three properties in London: two she sold on at a profit and one in which they still lived.

‘We’d only be able to rent it three months of the year,’ Tom said. ‘No one wants to holiday in the Adirondacks in winter, and it wouldn’t cover its annual costs on the summer rental alone.’

Kitty yawned. He didn’t seem to see the romance of owning a cabin in the American wilderness. Why had Dmitri bought it? She imagined it must be very beautiful. And then it slipped to the back of her mind over the next few weeks as she wrote her theatre reviews, had lunch or an early-evening drink with friends, took her yoga classes and ran the household she shared with her sensible, risk-averse husband.





Chapter Six

London, 18th July 2016

Kitty could not put her finger on what made her pick up Tom’s mobile phone when he went for a run one Saturday morning, leaving it on the hall table. She’d never done that in all the years they’d been together, even though she knew his password and he knew hers. It wasn’t a conscious decision to check his texts but the phone was lying there, she was standing looking at it, and somehow she found herself flicking through his messages. Almost immediately she found a photo of a naked woman with huge breasts and a message that read ‘Want more of this, baby? How about my place, 11 on Saturday morning.’ It finished with a heart emoji.

Kitty’s throat seemed to close up and she could feel the blood pumping in her temples. The sender of the text was called ‘Karren’, with two ‘r’s, and when she scrolled down she found several more texts, telling Tom he was the hottest lover she’d ever had, and making arrangements for other trysts. It appeared they’d been having an affair for at least two months; he hadn’t even bothered to delete the evidence.

She glanced at the clock: ten to eleven. He would be at Karren’s any moment now. What should she do?



Her closest friend, Amber, lived two streets away so Kitty jumped in the car, revving the engine as she raced round there. Amber was breastfeeding her youngest, only six weeks old, while her husband played with their two toddlers in the garden. Kitty didn’t bother with any preamble, simply handing her the phone with Karren’s nude photo on the screen.

‘Can you believe it? Look what Tom’s been up to behind my back! The utter bastard!’

She expected Amber to be shocked or perhaps try to think of innocent reasons why he might have such a picture on his phone. Instead she hesitated a fraction too long, not meeting Kitty’s eye, and the penny dropped.

‘You knew about this?’

Amber looked up miserably, and handed back the phone. ‘I’m so sorry. I thought I had persuaded him to knock it on the head without you finding out. I didn’t want you to be hurt.’

‘You knew!’ Kitty repeated. She couldn’t believe it. This was the woman with whom she shared her innermost secrets. They discussed everything from their most embarrassing sexual experiences to their fake-tan disasters, from their career dissatisfactions to their secret celebrity crushes. She was the one who had said the right things after Kitty’s parents’ deaths, the only person she could bear to discuss them with. Amber’s face was a study in guilt.

‘Kitty, I …’ she began, but Kitty shook her head, mouth open in astonishment and held up a hand to stop her. There was nothing to say. Amber had known and hadn’t told her. She turned and rushed from the house, knowing that Amber would never catch up with a baby in her arms.

She got back in the car and drove home, ignoring the persistent ringing of her phone on the passenger seat. Tom would be back soon, with a false smile and another woman’s scent clinging to him. The thought made her stomach heave. She didn’t want to be there, couldn’t face confronting him and all that would entail. The life she thought she was leading had fallen apart in an instant. Every plan she had made for the future, every dream assumed that Tom would love her forever and now it was clear he didn’t and wouldn’t. It felt like a double betrayal that Amber had known and not told her. She had to get out of the marital home, but where could she go that he wouldn’t find her?