DAN WALKED CLOSELY beside her. “Look, just get in the car and follow me down to the village. We’ll talk about it then.”
Chloe said nothing. She reversed out of Nicola’s driveway as if in a daze, and as she did, Dan saw her cast a questioning glance at the Ford Focus parked outside the house.
Dan drove off ahead and moments later, both vehicles stopped in the carpark of a local pub. His expression unreadable, Dan got in alongside Chloe.
“I’m sorry,” he said simply. “I just didn’t know how to tell you.”
“But how could you – how could you keep something like that from me, Dan? How could you go on for so long without saying anything?”
“I –”
Before he could answer, she went on. “That dog – Nicola’s dog – he’s one of those . . . one of those dogs, isn’t he? Like a guide dog except –”
“An assistance dog.” Dan clarified. “Yes, he is.”
Chloe shook her head. “But what happened to her? She hasn’t always been that way, has she?”
“No,” Dan answered sadly, “she hasn’t always been that way.”
The dog had been quite a shock for him. While keenly aware that over the last few years Nicola had all but resumed her independence, he had been unprepared for the dog’s role in that. He recalled the way Barney – as she called it – had instantly retrieved his mobile phone when it fell on the floor, and how the dog had closed the front door after he and Chloe left the house. Apparently, these assistance dogs could do great things altogether, like switch on and off lights, and load or unload washing-machines. Dan supposed he was a useful guard dog too – able to warn Nicola in advance of any impending danger.
“But why didn’t you tell me?” Chloe asked again.
Dan dropped his gaze to the dashboard. “I’m sorry. But as time went by it was getting harder and harder to say anything. I just didn’t know what you’d think of me and –”
“What happened?” Chloe asked again.
“I just didn’t know how to bring it up, Chloe. You have to understand –”
“Dan, just tell me!”
He could hear the desperation in her voice. This was it, he thought with growing unease. The moment he’d been dreading since Nicola came back.
Before speaking, Dan cleared his throat. “Well, Nicola and I had been through a lot, as you know, with the miscarriage and, of course, the thing with Ken Harris.”
Chloe nodded, waiting for him to continue.
“But we got over it – in fact we got over it faster – and possibly easier – than either of us had anticipated. We loved one another a lot, Chloe, and we were both equally determined to get through it, equally committed to making the marriage work.” He swallowed. “Of course, it wasn’t that easy for me to forgive Nicola for going near Harris, but yet I could understand why it happened. I suppose, for a while, Nicola and I were unconsciously avoiding – not just one another – but what had happened to us. We’d never really spoken about the miscarriage, never really shared our grief. After the Ken thing, I think we both realised what we had been doing, and that we were letting our marriage slip away from us.”
He knew Chloe wasn’t comfortable hearing this, but yet there was a strange sense of relief in getting the words out.
“After we admitted to one another how we were really feeling, and how fragile things had become, we both decided that although the marriage was weak, we still loved one another deeply and there was plenty to fight for. So, we set about doing just that. We spoke about moving out of our apartment in Bray, and buying a house of our own. We knew that, if our marriage was to survive, we’d have to make a fresh start.”
A new house was to signify a new beginning, a new chapter in their life together.
“For a while, it was terrific. Nicola left Metamorph and got another job in a hotel leisure centre – I suppose to reassure me that she wouldn’t be seeing Ken Harris again, but I knew he wasn’t a problem. All that mattered to me was that I’d got Nicola back – the old Nicola back.”
He saw Chloe flinch slightly at this.
“I’m sorry, Chloe. I suppose this is part of the reason I didn’t want to tell you. This kind of thing isn’t easy for you to hear.”
“Don’t worry about what I think,” Chloe said quietly. “Just go on.”
Dan exhaled. “Right. Well, as I said, the old Nicola was back and – believe me – this turned out to be a bit of a mixed blessing!” He laughed, remembering. “Nicola is full of unbelievable energy – always flitting off here, there and everywhere. She has absolutely no patience and sometimes you can’t get her to sit still in the same place for more than a few seconds!” He paused, realising that he was speaking about it in the present tense. “Anyway, she made an absolute mission out of the house-hunting – it was a big thing for her and I suppose it was something to work towards, something to aim for. I have to admit that I enjoyed it, too – the two of us would take off on our bikes on Saturday and Sunday afternoons to look at show-houses.”
“Bikes?”
Dan suspected Chloe was finding it hard to picture him on a bicycle. Dan adored his car.
“Yeah, Nicola wasn’t a great fan of traffic – she had a touch of the old road rage.” He smiled, almost affectionately, but then his expression became subdued. “But just when everything was started to fall into place for us, just when we were starting to get back on track and things were going well – almost too well . . . “his voice trailed off, sadly. “We had come through so much together – my parents, the miscarriage, Ken . . . we had come through it all, Chloe, and by then we were convinced that the two of us could survive anything.”
And they had been convinced, Dan thought. It didn’t matter what else life threw at them, they had each been convinced that they loved one another enough, that their marriage was strong enough to survive anything.
He laughed, a short bitter laugh. “But, it’s true what they say – if you want to give God a good laugh, tell him about your plans.”
“Nicola ended up in some kind of accident.” Chloe stated flatly.
Dan nodded. “On her bike. She was out cycling up near Glendalough on her afternoon off, and a tourist who didn’t know the road rounded a corner and ploughed into her – the bastard was lucky he didn’t kill her!”
Chloe shook her head sadly.
“I couldn’t believe it, Chloe. I just couldn’t believe it. After everything we’d been through, after everything we’d fought for, something like that had to happen – why?”
“I’m so sorry, Dan.”
“The ambulance brought Nicola to Loughlinstown, and from there they sent her on to St Vmcent’s. They set her up in traction but it wasn’t long before they came back with a full diagnosis. She’d damaged a section of her spine that couldn’t ever be renewed. While, she was OK as far as the waist, they were doubtful that she’d ever regain the use of her legs.”
“The poor thing, what must it have been like for her?”
Dan struggled to speak. This was the part he hated, the part he dreaded telling her. What would she think of him?
“However bad it was, I made it ten times worse,” he said hoarsely, a huge lump rising in his throat. “I got such a shock when they told us. I couldn’t handle it, Chloe, and for a long time I wouldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it. After everything . . . I kept expecting someone to tell me that it had all been a sick joke – a candid-camera type thing. I just couldn’t handle it.” Dan shook his head sadly, as if still trying to convince himself.
“What?” Chloe looked at him. “What are you talking about, Dan? Nicola was the one affected, not you. What do you mean you couldn’t handle it?”
It was seconds before the realisation hit her. Despite having met Nicola, Chloe still hadn’t understood. She hadn’t understood why he had gone to such lengths to hide it all from her. But now Chloe knew that it wasn’t so much his wife’s disability Dan had been hiding; it was his own reaction to it.
Dan was ashamed and so he should be.
“Oh – my – God,” she said, pronouncing each word slowly as she said it. “You left her, didn’t you, Dan? You left Nicola to deal with it all on her own.”
Dan said nothing but he didn’t need to. His shamefaced expression said it all.