The Marriage Act(65)

‘I thought I’d treat us,’ Roxi continued and kissed his cheek. Anything more passionate might arouse more suspicion than the sight of her cooking. ‘Could you pass me the carving knife?’ she asked and he removed it from its charger.

‘Where are the kids?’

‘They’re staying over with friends. I thought we could spend some quality time together.’

Roxi clocked the Audite, ensuring that, if it was recording, it was catching her every word. Then she recalled one of the seemingly endless list of quotes it had voiced earlier. ‘“You can’t pay attention to what matters most if you’re always in a hurry”,’ she recounted.

She interpreted Owen’s facial response as wondering who the hell this imposter was and what had she done with his wife.

‘I’ve been thinking about what you were saying about finding a common purpose,’ Roxi continued. ‘Would tonight be a good time to run through a few of my ideas?’

‘Um, well, yes, of course,’ he said.

Roxi took his jacket and, as she reached the coat hooks, she surreptitiously sniffed the collar, searching for the trace of another woman’s scent. She only recognized his cologne.

‘Sit, sit,’ she encouraged and beckoned him towards a chair in the adjoining dining room. She handed him his wine as an album they’d listened to back in their dating days hummed in the background. ‘Dinner shouldn’t be long.’

Twice Roxi’s phone pinged with message alerts and both times she fought to ignore it.

‘Do you want to check that?’ Owen asked, reaching for where it lay on the windowsill.

‘No, you can turn it off if you like,’ Roxi replied breezily. ‘How was your day?’

It was okay, he told her, but Roxi knew fine well how his day had been, or at least the early evening. Because he’d spent it with another woman. She was certain of this because she had tracked his car as it travelled from his industrial estate office to the village where Antoinette Cooper lived, the online troll trying to destroy her career and now her marriage. His car had remained there for one hour and nine minutes before he set off for home.

Roxi could not remember the last time she had cried – not during or after the birth of her children, on her wedding day or even at a film. Being shuffled around foster parents did that to a child, she reasoned. It toughened you up. It coated you in Teflon. Nothing stuck to you, no matter how bad it got. Yet as she had waited for his vehicle to leave Cooper’s property, something had snagged in her throat. And no matter how many times she’d swallowed, it wouldn’t budge.

She glanced at his sports bag in the kitchen, the one Antoinette Cooper had trolled her over. Was his kit unused as she suggested?

‘And how was the match tonight?’ she asked.

‘We were only training.’

‘If you pass me your kit, I’ll put it in the washing machine.’

‘Don’t worry, I’ll sort it out.’

‘It’s no trouble.’

‘No, you’ve made dinner,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll do it later.’

The ease of his lies astonished her. But then he’d been practising for months. After discovering his affair a week earlier, she had scanned the digital family calendar, noting every time he had posted that he’d be working late. It appeared his fling had been going on for almost five months and was a weekly occurrence, mostly Wednesday or Thursday evenings. To her shame, she hadn’t even noticed his absence.

Roxi’s mind had raced with questions since discovering her husband’s double life. How could he have done this to her? Who was Antoinette Cooper and did Owen know she had been trolling his wife? Did they laugh about it behind her back? What would happen to Roxi if he asked for a divorce? What would she be left with if Owen was to leave her? They were already living on top of one another in too small a house. And half the proceeds of any sale meant her next home was likely to be back in Old Northampton and the size of a rabbit hutch while he luxuriated in Cooper’s Georgian mansion.

And, most importantly, how would her career fare without the backbone of a marriage? There was a slim chance she might buck the trend by Vlogging as a divorcee, but she doubted it. She could always marry again, but who? It might take years to find a replacement.

Guilt hardened in her chest when she realized she hadn’t even considered the kids. Would she get the chance to reconnect with them if they were living separately? If she was being truly honest with herself, there was no ‘re’ about it. To reconnect, you must have had a connection in the first place. And she hadn’t allowed that to happen.

Roxi had listed her options: do nothing, put it to the back of her mind and hope their affair fizzled out; confront him and risk further Audite intervention; or remind Owen why he fell in love with her in the first place. So she did what she knew best and returned to an older version of herself, the one so scared of being alone that she diluted her needs for the sake of a partner. Owen was not as progressive as her so she scoured the internet for advice on what men expected from their wives back at the turn of the century when his parents first married. She learned there wasn’t the equality in homes that there was now. Back then, couples weren’t expected to share all the tasks. Perhaps that was why he was cheating on her with someone older than him? Was she offering a version of a woman that Roxi wasn’t? If it could save her marriage, she had little choice but to become a person Owen wanted to return home to, one with a meal on the table and a smile glued to her face.