The Younger Wife(61)

‘I’ve heard that,’ Darcy said. ‘But I just assumed that meant they weren’t reported to the police, not that they were never spoken of at all.’

Darcy spoke gently, without judgement. And yet Rachel found herself feeling defensive. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘My instincts told me to leave it, okay?’

Darcy had a strange look on his face. He shifted on the blanket, conspicuously silent after all his questions.

‘What?’ Rachel said. ‘You think I was wrong not to say anything?’

‘Look,’ Darcy said carefully. ‘I would never presume to know what was right or wrong for another person, particularly a woman who had been raped.’

‘But . . .?’

‘But,’ he said, ‘you say you have a close, loving family. So I guess I’m wondering why your instinct was to hide the truth from your dad.’

And that was the moment Rachel started wondering the same thing.





40


TULLY


Tully should have seen it coming.

It had been a stressful week. Since the day of the auction she’d been in a bit of a downward spiral. The fact that Snobby Celia knew about her shoplifting meant it might as well have been written in the sky. Yesterday at Pilates, the room had gone silent when Tully walked in. And the moment she walked out at the end of the class, the whispers started up again. Tully could have survived the whispers at Pilates – after all, once her membership expired she couldn’t afford to renew it anyway – but a few of the ladies from Pilates were also pre-school mothers, and a day later the whispers were happening there as well. Tully understood. A few months ago Tully would have delighted in this kind of scandal herself. How fast things could change.

On top of all this, her relationship with Sonny was still on shaky ground. The fifty-odd thousand dollars she’d given him had gone some distance towards smoothing this ground, but the fact that their house hadn’t fetched the price they’d been hoping for served to undo most of this good. Add to this the fact that Dad had set a wedding date with Heather, and that Tully had taken up permanent residence on Miles’s floor during the evening hours and, suffice to say, there were a lot of emotions swirling in her mind when she was in the baking aisle at the supermarket.

This, she presumed, was what brought on the urge to take the bottle of vanilla extract. Whatever it was, as soon as her fingers closed around the smooth glass bottle, everything else faded away. Her handbag sat in the basket in the front of her trolley in the spot where the boys sat if they were with her. It would be so easy. She just needed to lean forward as if about to put the bottle in the trolley but drop it into her bag instead, like she’d done so many times before.

After her last session with Dr Shearer, Tully had started on SSRIs, as well as a drug called naltrexone, which supposedly helped to control impulse-based behaviour. Fat lot of good it was doing her. Beyond that, she’d been given some ‘exercises’ to do if she found herself in this situation. The first was the most ridiculous of them all. Breathe. Good one, doc, she’d wanted to say. She needed to shoplift in order to breathe, that was the whole point! She didn’t tell Dr Shearer this, that would be rude. Who was she to point out that the technique he’d spent his whole life studying was useless? Instead she’d just nodded and smiled . . . even muttered, Breathe! What a wonderful idea.

The next step was to remove herself from temptation. This was important, apparently. Don’t remove the temptation, the psychologist had said. Remove yourself.

It won’t be easy. In fact, it will feel entirely unnatural, he’d warned. It might mean leaving the store. It might mean starting a conversation with someone when you least feel like it. It might mean drawing attention to yourself. Inviting attention. A circuit breaker, so to speak.

The pressure inside her was building. Tully tried reminding herself of the guilt she would feel afterwards. Lately, the guilt had become even more debilitating than the urge itself. Not to mention the terror of getting caught. After the incident at the department store, the police had put a note on her record, which meant that if she was caught shoplifting again, she would be prosecuted. She imagined having to tell Sonny she’d been caught. She imagined the boys finding out. Their friends’ parents gossiping about it.

Her grip tightened on the bottle as she held it over her bag. Then, at the last minute, she dropped it onto the floor, hard.

‘Whoops,’ Tully said as it smashed into pieces.

Three women nearby looked away from the shelves to the broken bottle. One of them was a woman about Tully’s age with twin toddlers strapped into a double pram and a newborn dangling from a pouch on her chest. ‘Oh, phew,’ she said. ‘I thought one of my kids did it!’

‘Me too,’ muttered another woman, whose little boy kept kicking a ball despite her begging for him to stop.

‘I’ll call an attendant,’ said the third, a helpful woman in her seventies, carrying just a small basket.

All of them smiled at each other. And Tully felt something, a tiny thing, release in her.

‘Thank you,’ Tully said. ‘That would be a great help.’

She couldn’t wait to tell Dr Shearer.





41


RACHEL


Rachel stood on her father’s doorstep holding a box of red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. She knew Dad wouldn’t be home; he always cycled on Saturday afternoons. That was why she’d chosen this time.