The French Girl(28)



“So . . .” he says, between bites. “Lara and Modan? Is that for real?”

I grimace. “Well, she certainly seems smitten,” I say apologetically. I wonder if that question has itched away at him all night.

“Yeah, that much was obvious.” There’s no emotion in his voice. He takes a bite and chews thoughtfully, staring unseeingly across the kitchen. “It’s not ideal.”

Not ideal. It’s an oddly phlegmatic turn of phrase for heartbreak. “I guess. On any number of fronts.” I put down my fork, unable to eat and unable to wait, and twist on the bar stool to face his profile. “What did you mean last night?”

He turns to look at me, his head cocked to one side analytically. Then he lays his cutlery down, too, but he’s actually finished, the enormous omelet polished off in a handful of bites. He knows exactly what I’m referring to, and to his credit he doesn’t try to dissemble. “Severine was an attractive girl,” he says carefully. I nod and wonder where she is. Surely she wouldn’t want to miss out on this conversation. “Modan seems to find it hard to believe that none of us were sleeping with her. He’s playing a ‘what if’ game right now. What if . . . well, what if Tom was sleeping with Severine? But that’s unlikely because everyone knows I hooked up with Lara that week, and Modan clearly thinks Lara is more than enough for one man to cope with.” His tone is heavy with irony. He pauses for a moment; I can’t tell if he’s remembering the past or looking to the future, but regardless, it seems the view is bleak. “But what if Seb was sleeping with Severine? Well, that would certainly make things interesting . . .”

He stops, holding my gaze. The question that we both know I’m going to ask hangs in the air between us, solid enough to reach out and touch.

“I want to know,” I say quietly.

Tom looks away and runs a hand through his hair, then fixes me in his gaze again. “Do you really care?” There’s an edge to his voice. “After all this time? Ten years have passed since that week in France—ten years and a bloody marriage ceremony.”

“I care about whether I was made a fool of.” I sound bitter. I feel bitter. And impatient. “I care about whether all my friends knew what was going on under my nose but didn’t tell me.”

“So it’s all about pride.”

“Yes. No. I don’t know—look, was he fucking her or not?”

“Yes,” he says simply.

I open my mouth to say something, but nothing comes to mind. I close it again. Pride, I think. Tom is right on that score: my pride is well and truly hurt. Severine has finally made her entrance: she’s watching me from across the kitchen and my fingers curl in an urge to drag my nails down those perfectly smooth cheeks, an urge so strong that I almost recoil from myself: the poor girl is dead; no one can possibly feel envious of her ever again. She watches me, and I fancy she knows what I’m thinking: she looks coolly to the side, as if utterly uninterested in my opinion. Tom is watching me, too, his brow furrowed in concern. I start to slide down from the bar stool.

“No,” says Tom assertively, bringing me up short by grabbing my arm. “You don’t get to disappear now. You wanted to know, so you have to listen to it all instead of building up all sorts of crazy scenarios in your head.” His eyes are fiercely intent. “Kate, this is not some conspiracy theory; nobody has been whispering behind your back. It was a onetime thing, on the last night only. Hardly anyone knows about it. Seb doesn’t even know that I know about it.”

I process that for a moment, fighting my urge to flee. The last night. “After the fight, then.” He nods. His grip loosens on my upper arm; instead he rubs his hand reassuringly up and down from my shoulder to my elbow. The last night, after the fight. “You said hardly anyone. Who else?”

“I don’t know for sure,” he says uneasily. “But maybe . . . Caro.”

“Caro. Of course. It would have to be Caro.” Of all people it would have to be her. I bet she has loved having that piece of knowledge secreted away, ready to be deployed at just the right moment for maximum personal advantage. I can just imagine how superior it has made her feel. I find my hands have clawed; I force myself to breathe out slowly and relax them. “How do you know about it then?”

“I saw them,” he admits. “I don’t know for sure, but I think Caro did, too; or at least, she put two and two together.” I can see him gauging my reaction, trying to work out if each additional detail makes things better or worse, but nevertheless he’s unflinching in his delivery. He releases my arm and runs his hand through his hair again instead. He looks as if, on balance, he’d much rather not have seen . . . What did he see exactly? I steel myself for the malevolent march of that thought eating away at me, the rot spreading at a steady rate until I can see nothing without an overlay of Seb and Severine in various different tangles of limbs, artfully backlit Hollywood-style—but a thoroughly unexpected dose of pragmatism hits me. The last night of the holiday, that famously eventful Friday night? Logistically, it couldn’t have happened until after the fight, at which point Seb was already so drunk that, at some point when I have some perspective, I may be impressed that he managed to cheat on me at all. I’m fairly certain there was no cinematic glow involved that night. But . . .

“How do you know it wasn’t happening all week, and you just didn’t see it the other times?”

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