The Wife Page 8

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘No. I know it isn’t, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I haven’t got anything planned, and if Michael’s not home …’

  ‘I said no, Liam.’ I hold his gaze, because I mean it. I don’t want him to come home with me. I don’t need him to do that. I don’t need looking after. ‘Besides, I’m not going home. I’m going to work.’

  ‘Okay.’ He holds up his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘I get the message.’

  I gather up my things and fish my car keys out of my bag, and then I hesitate for a second. I give his offer of company a second thought. If Michael still isn’t back. Then I push that thought to the back of my mind. I need to be on my own now, to think.

  ‘I really am grateful, Liam. For everything.’

  We fall into step alongside each other as we walk to our cars, the silence between us so different to the one that constantly haunts Michael and me. This one is a friendly, comfortable silence, whereas the ones that have gradually developed between me and my husband – they’re laced with unspoken words, locked-away feelings, they’re tinged with guilt.

  ‘Hey. Come here.’

  We stop by my car and I turn to face Liam; let him pull me in for a hug.

  ‘Remember what I said, all right? I’m always here, if you need me.’

  I step back from him, and I smile. ‘I know.’

  I watch as he heads down to the street, to his own car, wait until he’s driven away before I get into mine, and once again I just sit there. I don’t make any attempt to drive away, not yet. I turn on the radio and I sit back and look outside at the busy street. I need another minute, that’s all. And as I sit there my mind goes back to that phone call I heard Michael make just a couple of nights ago. Was it really just a work colleague he was talking to? He offered me his phone, told me I could check for myself, but that could’ve been nothing more than him calling my bluff. He knows I would never do that. I couldn’t be that woman, except, I am. I am that woman.

  I close my eyes and sigh quietly. Has it helped? Offloading all my crap onto Liam’s shoulders? I don’t know. I don’t know if anything can help. I just know that I’ve started something I have every intention of finishing now. And if I have to do that alone, then that’s fine, I’m okay with that. It might even be better that way. But I need to know what my husband’s hiding. I need to know who my husband’s seeing; why he’s lying to me. I need to know what he’s doing when he isn’t with me. I need to know. And I’m going to find out.

  Chapter 12

  ‘Liam told me you bumped into each other today.’

  ‘We did.’ I hand Michael a glass of wine and sit down on the couch by the fireplace, curling my legs up underneath myself. ‘We went for lunch, at that new bistro not far from the Durham salon.’

  I haven’t asked him where he went today, why he wasn’t where he said he would be. I haven’t asked him anything. I’m biding my time. Waiting until he trips himself up, gives something away, because he will. He thinks he can hide behind his charm, use that smile to disguise his deceit. I’m watching you, Michael. I’m watching you.

  ‘So, what did you talk about?’

  I take a sip of wine. ‘Nothing in particular.’

  ‘Did you talk about us? About me and you?’

  I frown slightly, because that’s a strange question. Would he be angry if he thought I was talking about us?

  ‘We talked about a lot of things. But, yeah, I mentioned us.’

  It’s hard not to, when it’s all I can think about most days. Us. What we had. What I want back, at any cost.

  ‘Do you remember who we used to be, Michael?’

  ‘We’re still those people, Ellie.’

  ‘Are we?’ I don’t want him to answer that. He doesn’t need to. ‘Do you remember who we were?’

  He looks at me, and there it is, that change of expression, the fear that I’m about to launch into that conversation he continually avoids, and I wait for the inevitable shut-down.

  ‘We loved each other.’

  That throws me slightly. I wasn’t expecting an answer, I was expecting the usual barriers to come up. He used the past tense; we loved each other, that’s what he said. Loved. I still love him.

  ‘We were those people who loved life and lived it, every day, like it was the last one we were ever going to experience.’

  My wonderful, idealistic husband. It can never be that way again, and I think, deep down, even he knows that.

  ‘What happened changed that. What happened changed everything.’

  ‘For a while, yes. It did …’

  ‘For a while?’ I put my drink down and sit up, my eyes fixed on his. He is going to listen to me now and he is going to understand the pain and the fear I still feel, every day. ‘I lost our baby, Michael. I miscarried our child, I … you think that changed everything for a while?’

  He gets up and comes over to me, sits down beside me. He takes my hand and he brings it to his mouth, kissing it gently, and I’m so angry at myself for crying now. So fucking angry.

  ‘We can’t go on like this, Ellie. We can’t. It isn’t good for us. It isn’t good for you. I hate seeing you like this.’

  ‘Then let me talk, Michael. Please. Let me talk about it.’

  He drops his gaze, but he keeps hold of my hand, his fingers tightening around mine. ‘Ellie, sweetheart, I just think – I think that dwelling on it, on what happened, it’s unhealthy. We can’t change anything, we can’t turn back the clock …’

  ‘I know. I know that, but – do you know how difficult it is for me? To keep all this shit bottled up inside because you don’t want to talk about it?’

  ‘We’ve talked about it so many times, Ellie. We’ve been over and over it, so many fucking times, and it needs to stop now. It needs to stop.’

  ‘And what? That’s it? Where does that leave me, Michael? Hmm? Where does that leave me? Should I be – I don’t know – grateful that you’re over it?’

  ‘That isn’t what I meant …’

  ‘I still need to talk, Michael. I still need to talk; do you understand that? Because I don’t think you do. Oh, you’ll give your students all the time they need, they can talk to you, but your own wife?’

  ‘Ellie, come on …’

  ‘They can talk to you, Michael.’

  He slowly raises his gaze, his fingers gripping my hand tighter still.

  ‘What’s going on here, Ellie?’

  I pull my hand away from his. I sit back, pull my knees to my chest, hugging them to me as I stare out ahead of me. I take a deep breath. I don’t want to go there again, I don’t want to keep remembering, but the memories are racing forward now. They’re too powerful to ignore.

  ‘When I woke up, in hospital – when I woke up, and you told me …’ I drop my head, bite down on my lip, I don’t want to cry any more. ‘When you told me we’d lost the baby, I felt so empty, Michael. So fucking empty. It felt like – like I’d died, too.’ I look up, turn to face him. ‘Like we’d died.’

  ‘Ellie …’

  He reaches for my hand again and I let him take it. ‘We didn’t just lose a baby, did we? We lost us?’

  He rests his palm against my cheek, his eyes looking deep into mine, and I feel a wave of love so strong for this man flood me. It knocks the breath right out of me.

  ‘No, my darling, we didn’t. We didn’t.’

  I think we did.

  ‘It’s like you’ve forgotten our baby ever existed,’ I whispered, covering his hand with mine, our fingers sliding together. ‘And I can’t do that.’

  He sighs quietly, squeezes my hand gently. ‘You were hurting so much, Ellie. I just didn’t want to hurt you any more.’

  ‘I felt so alone, Michael. A huge part of me had been ripped away, taken from me in a way that …’ I don’t finish that sentence. I can’t. Losing the baby was painful enough, but remembering the way it happened …

  ‘We had it all planned, remember? Names. The book
s we’d read to him or her. The school we wanted our child to go to. Where we were going to take our son or daughter on his or her first holiday …’

  ‘Don’t do this to yourself, Ellie, please.’

  I look away, look down at my arms hugging my knees. ‘I wanted that baby, so much.’

  ‘We wanted that baby. It hurt me too, losing our child like that.’

  My head snaps up, my eyes meeting his. ‘Did it?’

  ‘You really have to ask that?’

  ‘You were ready to get rid of the nursery. Ready to paint over the past like our baby had never existed …’

  ‘That’s not what it was like, and you know that. Losing the baby hurt me too, Ellie.’

  ‘It’s just that, you were so busy telling me we had to put it all behind us, had to forget …’

  ‘I didn’t tell you to forget about the baby. I never once told you to do that.’

  ‘Losing our child makes up so much of what happened that night, Michael. So forgetting isn’t something I can do. Even if you can.’

  I want to ask him who Ava is. I want to ask him, but if I mention her name, if I go into specifics he’ll think I’ve been spying on him. And he’d be right, that’s exactly what I’m doing, but I don’t want him to know that. So I can’t mention her. Not yet.

  ‘I worry, Michael. That it’s going to happen again, that history is going to repeat itself and I can’t go through it a second time, I can’t … I can’t do it.’

  He looks at me, right into my eyes. He’s throwing me a silent instruction. He’s telling me to end this, to stop this, to shut up.

  ‘It won’t happen again. You think I’d let that happen again? I didn’t let it happen the first time, I had no fucking idea …’ He rakes a hand back through his hair, briefly turning away from me. I’m making him relive everything he’s succeeded in pushing to the back of his mind, but it happened, and I can’t forget it. He wants to. And when I don’t allow that, this happens. ‘Don’t ask me to change who I am, Ellie, because I can’t do that.’ He turns back to face me; his blue eyes have darkened now. He wants me to get this, to listen to him. To obey. ‘What happened was a mistake. A tragic mistake …’

  I can’t stop the laugh escaping. He’s almost trivialising what happened. And then I look at him, right at him. His eyes bore deep into mine and I can see the faint trace of his own pain still there. He just refuses to share it with me and that’s what upsets me. That’s what’s helping to tear us apart while I’m struggling to keep us together.

  ‘Please, Ellie, I’m begging you now. Stop this. Please.’

  He reaches out and wipes a tear from my cheek with his thumb.

  ‘I know that – what you went through, it affected you so much more than me …’

  ‘You weren’t there,’ I whisper, closing my eyes as I try not to remember that night, but it’s impossible. I can’t forget it. I’m not sure I ever will, it’s still there, every terrifying, devastating second, embedded in my brain like a permanent memory that can never be erased. People keep telling me it can be erased, but it can’t. People tell me I’m refusing to let it go, but how can I? So much was taken from me that night. So much was stolen from me, and I can’t get it back. We changed, that night. We changed, forever.

  ‘You think I don’t know that? I know I wasn’t there, Ellie. I know I couldn’t get to you in time …’

  ‘You’re not here now. Are you?’

  He frowns. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  I turn away from him. I don’t want to start that conversation. It’s not the right time. ‘Nothing. It doesn’t mean anything. I’m just tired.’ I take another deep breath, turn back to look at him, smiling slightly. I don’t want to push this. I need to step back. Keep watching him. I’ll find out what I need to know. I just need to be patient.

  I let go of his hand and stand up, walking over to the window. It’s dark and it’s raining, a hard, heavy kind of rain that hits the ground outside with a force that sends splashes of water high into the air, and I wonder where this storm came from all of a sudden. It’s been such a beautiful day. I never saw this coming. But sometimes we don’t see things coming. Even when the signs have been there, signs we should’ve picked up on, dealt with, stopped in their tracks before they grew into something terrifying. Dangerous. Tragic.

  Sometimes we don’t see things coming …

  Fourteen Months Earlier …

  ‘Is everything okay?’ I ask Michael as he sits down and begins searching through a pile of papers that has been there on the kitchen table since he came home from work a couple of hours ago. I know better than to move anything of his that might be work-related. ‘Is it something important?’

  ‘Hmm? Sorry?’ He looks up, his eyes meeting mine.

  ‘Whatever you’re looking for. Is it important?’

  ‘No … No, it’s just something I might need for this meeting tonight.’ He smiles at me, and I join him at the table, pouring myself a glass of water. I’m craving wine, beer, a strawberry Mojito. I’d kill for a hit of alcohol, but at just over thirteen weeks’ pregnant Michael won’t even let me sniff the cork from the bottle of red he and Liam shared the other night. But we’ve been trying for so long to have this baby, so I’m quite happy to sacrifice anything for our child.

  ‘You seem a little on edge.’ And he does, just a little. I can see it on his face. ‘Are you sure everything’s okay?’

  ‘Everything’s fine, Ellie. There’s just a lot going on right now, that’s all. We’re trying to set up a new research project, hire another member of staff, and on top of that we’ve still got tutorials, student mentoring. You know I don’t like to neglect my students. It’s a busy time.’

  ‘You can deal with that kind of stuff with your eyes closed.’ I rest my elbow on the table, cup my chin in my hand and I smile at him. ‘You got a new fan club yet? Any fights over the front row in the lecture theatre?’

  My husband. The handsome professor. He’s been the focus of a fair few crushes in his time, but I think he secretly likes the attention.

  ‘I can’t help being the Indiana Jones of the English Literature world, can I?’ He grins, and I throw him a look.

  ‘I think you’re over-selling yourself a bit there.’ I get up and go to check on the chicken roasting in the oven. ‘Do you have to go out tonight?’

  ‘I promised Laurel and Frank I’d meet them for dinner. We really need to push forward with the decision on this new staff member, but if we can’t agree on who’s best for the post …’

  ‘As Head of Department shouldn’t you have the final say?’

  I feel him come up behind me, his arms pulling me back against him, his hands resting lightly on my stomach. ‘I don’t run a dictatorship. I’d like us all to agree on this one.’ He kisses the side of my neck and I feel a hot shiver race up my spine. I’ve loved this man for so long now, and there are days when I still wake up and wonder how I got so lucky; why this clever, handsome, funny man fell for me.

  ‘I really wish you could stay at home,’ I murmur, laying my head against his shoulder, his breath warm on my neck.

  ‘I wish I could stay at home, too.’

  ‘I was going to take a long, hot bath. Who’s going to wash my back now?’

  His hand moves up to touch my breast, his thumb flicking over my nipple, and I close my eyes and bite down on my lip as his mouth brushes over my shoulder. ‘These get bigger during pregnancy, right?’

  I gently elbow him in the stomach, and he cries out in mock pain.

  ‘That kind of remark is beneath you, professor.’

  ‘Oh, I can be as shallow as the next person, believe me.’

  I turn around and laugh as he pulls me back into his arms. ‘I love you so much, Michael.’

  ‘I love you more.’

  My eyes flicker shut as he kisses me. I slide my fingers into his hair, his hand on the small of my back keeping me pressed against him.

  ‘I’ve just got to make a quick call, okay? I nee
d to speak to Liam before I go, make sure he’s all right. All this business with Keeley is really getting to him, even though he won’t admit it.’ He grins at me and kisses the tip of my nose. ‘I’ll be right back.’

  I lean back against the counter, still smiling as I watch him almost run out of the kitchen, hear him bound up the stairs, and I let a hand fall onto my stomach. There’s no bump there yet, nothing to let anyone know that we’re finally pregnant, but we know, that our baby is finally on his or her way, and it makes me smile, every day. That little person inside me, they are going to be so loved because we have waited so long for this child.

  I shift my gaze from the doorway to the table, my eyes falling on the pile of papers Michael’s left there. There’s something just poking out from the middle of the pile. It looks like an envelope. And I don’t know why, but I go over and I slowly slide the envelope out. I pick it up, turning it over in my hands.

  ‘Put that down, Ellie.’

  My head shoots up the second I hear his voice. I don’t even get a chance to glance down at the envelope, but my fingers refuse to let go of it.

  He comes over to me, takes the envelope from me and slides it into his back pocket. ‘It’s work, Ellie. Nothing for you to be concerned about.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know why I did that … it must be my hormones. This pregnancy’s already turning my brain to mush.’

  He smiles and takes my hands in his, pulling me against him as he kisses me quickly. ‘You just concentrate on taking care of yourself, and our little one. Okay? You don’t need to worry about anything.’

  I look up into his eyes and I nod, and the more I look at him the more convinced I am that he has something on his mind. But it’s a busy time of year, and now he’s Head of Department his workload’s increased, so maybe he really has just got a lot on.

  ‘You can talk to me, Michael, if you need to – if you just want to offload. I know how important it is to do that sometimes …’

  ‘Ellie, I’m fine. I’ll just be a lot better once we finally decide on this new member of staff. We need that lecturer in place as soon as possible, then I’ll relax a little more. I promise.’