The Wife Before Me(44)
‘So much for allowing me to hammer a nail into your precious walls.’ His disappointment was acute but Amelia was beyond caring.
‘Hammer a nail, yes,’ she shrieked. ‘But not this – this monstrosity.’ She pushed him away when he attempted to reason with her. Was it that push that finally ignited his anger and caused him to slap her across her face? She struck him back, then ran from the bathroom to their bedroom and locked him out. Covering her ears, she drowned out the thump of his fist against the door, his pleas to allow him in. She had snatched greedily at happiness, believing it would compensate for the loss of her father. It mocked her now, this illusion that one would cancel out the other.
His face was blotched and wet with tears when she eventually relented and opened the door to him. They clung together, silencing each other’s apologies with frantic kisses. He carried her to their bed and promised to organise the removal of the new bath in the morning.
She was still in his arms when she awoke. How trivial their argument seemed in the light of a new day. His sense of insecurity since their marriage had disturbed her yet she had fought with him as soon as he made his first independent decision. Was John controlling her from beyond his grave? Was that why she so reluctant to change anything in Woodbine?
The bath remained in place and she eventually became used to its bulbous shape. Nicholas used it regularly in the evenings but never again suggested that Amelia share it with him.
* * *
Summer came. Jayden Lee-O’Meara returned to Kilfarran for his annual visit to his father. He phoned Amelia, as he always did on these occasions, and arranged to meet her after work for a meal in the Kilfarran Inn. Jay’s career as an engineer had turned him into a global traveller. He was much changed from the gauche teenager who had given Amelia her first kiss and left her broken-hearted – or so she had believed then – when he moved to California. Love had now turned to friendship. They kept in touch through email and phone calls, always falling back into a familiar, easy conversation when they were together again.
On this occasion, though, he was subdued. His engagement to Hailey was off.
‘Incompatible and irreconcilable differences,’ Hailey had said when she gave him back his ring. These differences had largely to do with the amount of travelling he had to do but she had also accused him of ‘mental infidelity’. A state of mind, he told Amelia ruefully, that caused both his head and his heart to be elsewhere when he and Hailey were together. By the time he and Amelia had dissected his broken relationship and put it back together again, Jay looked more relaxed. He admitted that Hailey might have had a point about his ‘mental infidelity’.
‘I left so much of myself behind in Kilfarran when my mother uprooted me,’ he said. ‘It’s only in these latter years that I’ve understood what a wrench that was, especially leaving you. As the song goes, the first cut is the deepest.’ He smiled to show he was joking but, just for a moment, the memory of the sunshine days when they had kissed in the long grass in Kilfarran Woods, heedless and in love, kept them silent.
She had stayed later than she intended with Jay and, having lowered the sound on her phone, was unaware until she was back in her car that Nicholas had been trying to contact her. Five texts and three missed calls. She rang him but his phone went to message.
He was waiting for her in the living room, seated erectly in the armchair where John used to sit. Was he angry or anxious? Unable to read his mood, she was nonetheless filled with a sense of foreboding as he stood up to greet her. Her good humour plummeted as his questions turned into accusations. He had been expecting her home at eight. He spoke quietly but emphatically. It was now after ten. How could a meal booked for five in the evening have lasted so long? What was so fascinating about Jayden Lee-O’Meara that Amelia had forgotten to text her husband, who had spent the last two hours out of his mind with worry in case she had had an accident?
Was Nicholas her husband or her custodian, Amelia demanded. How dare he accuse her and Jay of being lovers? Did he expect her to fill out a time sheet for him to study and approve every time she met her friends? He silenced her with his fist. A blow to the side of her head that sent her reeling. Stunned, she collapsed to the floor, blood in her mouth, her hands protecting her cheeks. Ashen-faced and contrite, he knelt beside her and begged her forgiveness. She shoved him away from her. That first slap, when she had retaliated, why had she not given it more thought? She had assumed it was an aberration, just as her instinctive response had been, but this was different. Everything had changed in an instant. Like a drowning. A hit-and-run. A world turned upside down by a random act.
Jealousy was his undoing, he begged her to understand why he had reacted so angrily. It consumed him when she was with other men and twisted his feelings into a fist. An apt metaphor, she thought, and one she hoped he would never use again. They made up, of course they did. Love was not yet a choice to give or withhold. He wiped her tears and stroked her forehead until she was calm again and able to forgive him.
When, two months later, she was on the floor again, the shock was all the greater because the lull in between had been idyllic. They had loved more fervently, tenderly, determinedly. Amelia, desperate to rationalise his fury, tried to appreciate his furious response when she accidentally knocked a glass of vodka over the keyboard on his laptop. The corrosive alcohol had burned the components and wiped the contents. Nicholas did not have a proper backup system to recover his files and, he said, her clumsiness had wiped out years of confidential client information.