The Other Us: the RONA winning perfect second chance romance to curl up with. Fiona Harper
I look up at the clock on the kitchen wall. Flip! Where has the time gone? He’ll be home soon. I quickly turn my laptop off and shove it on the Welsh dresser, covering it with a cookery book and some takeaway leaflets that came through the door. I start washing up, just to keep myself occupied and I don’t even notice what I’m cleaning because I’m staring out of the window.
Dan, a safe bet?
After twenty-four years of marriage, I’m just starting to realise I might have been wrong about that.
The door slams about half an hour later, when I’m upstairs in the bathroom, and I come down to see Dan’s coat thrown in the direction of the rack and his shoes kicked off, clogging up the hallway. I’ve been nagging him about that for as long as we’ve lived together. I don’t know how many times I’ve almost broken a bone tripping over them. I pick them up and tuck them into the Ikea unit I bought specifically for them, which is populated by lots of my shoes and none of his, and then I go into the kitchen.
‘Hi,’ he says and plants a kiss on my cheek.
It’s a nice thing to do, I suppose, and for a long time I knew he did it because he was happy to see me at the end of the day; now I suspect it’s just habit.
‘You’ll never guess what?’ I say. ‘Oaklands is having a reunion. I saw it on Facebook.’ I shut my mouth quickly. I hadn’t intended to say that. I was going to tell him about Sophie.
Dan raises his eyebrows in interest as he fills the kettle, and I realise that now I’ve opened this can of worms I’m just going to have to carry on. I reel off the names of people in the Facebook group I remember. Jude’s name is on the tip of my tongue and I have to keep leapfrogging over it.
I’m usually a nice person. I try to get along with everyone, not to be bitchy or mean-spirited, but I’m aware there’s a part of me that actually wants to blurt Jude’s name out, just to see how Dan reacts. But I don’t. I keep the words inside my head.
It’s getting a bit crowded in there now with all the things I want to say but never do. I worry that one day my brain will get too full and all the things I’ve thought but don’t want Dan to know will come tumbling out.
Thinking of things I don’t want Dan to know, I feel my cheeks growing hot. I closed my laptop ages ago, but I’ve been thinking about Jude all afternoon. Not that last time we spoke, but other things: the way he used to kiss, how he could make me melt just by looking at me. I can’t quite look my husband straight in the eye now.
He gets a pair of mugs out the cupboard then turns to face me. ‘Do you want to go?’
I open my mouth and stop. I realise I have no answer. I’ve been so busy living in a slightly steamy fantasy all afternoon, I haven’t considered it. ‘Do you?’
He shrugs. ‘Not fussed. Whatever you want to do.’ And then he turns back and carries on making the tea.
I want to scream at him. I know it sounds lovely having a husband who’s accommodating about everything, but sometimes I think it’s just a ruse so all the decision-making is left to me. I’m tired, weighed down by the responsibility of a thousand tiny things: what to eat for dinner each night, which car we buy, what colour to paint the living room and which restaurant to visit on the odd occasion we eat out. Maybe that’s why I let Becca lead me round by the nose? On some level, it’s a relief.
Dan hands me a mug of tea – he always makes me one when he comes in from work – and then he heads off towards the hallway. ‘Just going to go up to the study and do some … you know … marking. On the computer. What time’s dinner?’
Now, this might sound like an ordinary domestic conversation, but it isn’t. Dan isn’t making eye contact and it all came out in a bit of a rush. I look carefully at him.
‘We’re having pasta … probably around seven.’
‘Cool.’ He turns and head upstairs with his cup of tea.
Half an hour later, I go to the box room above the hallway that we’ve always used as a study, seeing as that second baby never did come along. I don’t knock. Dan looks startled and he quickly closes down a window on the screen. Just text, no pictures. It didn’t look like a web page, I don’t think, but it was definitely something he didn’t want me to see.
‘What you up to?’ I ask breezily.
‘Oh, just some marking,’ Dan says, without looking round. ‘By the way, I thought I’d let you know I’m getting together with Sam – you remember Sam Macmillan? We went to school together? – on Thursday evening. We’re going out for a pint so I might be back a bit late.’ His tone is light but there’s a tension lying underneath it that stretches his words tight.
My insides go cold.
I know Sam Macmillan. I’m friends with his wife Geraldine on Facebook. And I know for a fact that they’re away celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary in Prague this week, because I’ve been gradually going green with envy seeing all the holiday snaps and still-so-in-love selfies.
‘OK,’ I say as I reach for his mug and retreat. I feel shivery inside as I head back down the stairs. I leave the mug on the kitchen table instead of putting it in the dishwasher and I stare out the French windows that lead to our small and slightly overgrown garden.
This is it, then.
Before now it’s just been a feeling, a sense that something isn’t right. That’s what I was going to tell Becca about today. Now I have something concrete.
I pick up my mobile and open the door to the garden, dial my best friend’s number. I know it’s usually all about Becca when we get together, but just for ten minutes I really, really need it to be about me.
‘It could be nothing,’ Becca says firmly. ‘It could be something really innocent.’
I take a moment to weigh her words. ‘Was it innocent when Grant kept turning his phone off the moment he walked through the door so he didn’t get any calls he couldn’t explain, or when you discovered he had an email account you didn’t know about?’
Becca sighs. ‘No. I wanted to believe it was, but it wasn’t.’
We’re both silent as we process the implication of what I’ve just told her – about Dan’s behaviour growing more secretive over the last couple of months. How he’s spending more and more time in the study. How he often shuts down what he’s doing if I enter. How he keeps meeting up with friends he hasn’t seen in years, but only every other Thursday night.
I close my eyes. I don’t want to go through this. I don’t want to be pulled apart at the seams, like Becca was throughout the discovery of her husband’s infidelity and their subsequent divorce. I don’t want Sophie to come from a broken home, even though she’s technically a grown-up now. She worships her father, even though she teases him about being a boring old fart. I don’t want her to have to know this.
Could I? Could I just close my eyes and pretend this isn’t happening?
‘What are you going to do?’ Becca asks, interrupting my thoughts.
My throat is suddenly swollen and I need to swallow before I can push any words out of my mouth. ‘I don’t know.’
I expect Becca to get all post-divorce militant on me, tell me to deck him one or go and take my best dressmaking scissors to his suits; but instead, she exhales loudly and says, ‘Oh, Mags …’
That’s when the tears start to fall. I wipe them away quickly with the heel of my hand. I don’t want Dan to know I’ve been crying when I go back inside. Stupid, I know. Why does this little secret even matter when there are much bigger ones eating away at the heart of our marriage?
‘You’ll