“I’m devastated.”
I’d parked the car in the garage and was preparing to close the door when Edie door stepped me. I could tell straightaway that I was the cause of Edie’s devastation. It didn’t take a neurosurgeon to work out why. I’d opened my mouth to Chancer, and he’d had a go at his estranged wife. Shit.
“I thought I could trust you. I thought you were my friend.” Very few women manage to pull off crying their lungs out without ending up with a red nose, red eyes and mascara down their cheeks. Edie wept with abandon and savage grace, like it was an art form, yet she did not have so much as an eyelash out of place. In her flowing sleeveless dress, all pinks and muted greens, she resembled a damsel in distress from a hundred-year-old old fairy-tale.
“I am your friend, but I’m Chancer’s too.” And I was Chancer’s first, although I didn’t spell this out.
“You accused him,” she sobbed.
“I didn’t accuse him. I asked him. Anyway, if it’s true—”
“If?”
I took a smart step back. “What I meant is that you’re a victim, so you don’t need to take any garbage from Chancer.”
“I told you in confidence,” she wailed.
“Then I’m very sorry you think I broke it.” Which was a mealy-mouthed way of saying I apologise for nothing. “Look, why don’t you come in?”
Although she did a mean line in hurt and dejection, mercifully the tears magically stopped.
“I was so touched you came to Scarlet’s funeral,” I said with genuine warmth.
Edie dithered, plunging her hands into the pockets of her dress, weakening. “If you’re sure.”
“I’d like it.” Because an idea, that had hovered on the edges of my consciousness, with Edie’s help, I could net.
“All right,” she said.
I led Edie through the garden and up the lavender scented path. She admired my best effort at a cottage garden, a rebellious patch of phlox and old-fashioned plants like foxgloves and hollyhocks. Subconsciously, it was my response to the ordered borders at my parents. I thought again about my conversation with Mum. What could she say that would change a thing? How could she defend the indefensible?
I opened the back door and Edie followed me inside.
“I love the way you’ve done your kitchen. It’s modern but still cosy.” Edie, it seemed, had gone from injured starlet to gushing sycophant in the time it took me to boil an egg.
“Elderflower or Cranberry?” I didn’t have Edie down for a Coca-Cola sort of girl – too much caffeine.
She plumped for Elderflower and I poured two glasses. We sat across from each other and Edie took a nervous sip. She really was very pretty. I let her settle and set the pace.
“I’m sorry about earlier. I didn’t mean to have a go.”
“I take it divorce proceedings aren’t going well?”
Edie looked up, pain in her eyes. “I can’t bear it.”
I have little knowledge of couples splitting up bar the obvious: good-natured people morphing into unreasonable, unhinged, irrational psychos. This either lasts for a short space of time or decades. At one of my friend’s weddings, the mother of the bride forbade her ex-husband from walking his daughter down the aisle. I viewed Edie with sympathy, but I also thought she was bloody hard work.
“Might it be a good idea to give Chancer space?”
She recoiled. At a loss, I ran my finger over the grain of the table, trying to look wise and enlightened. “Maybe the time for fighting is over.”
“I’m not the one doing it.”
I looked up, caught her exasperation. She had the demeanour of a three-year-old told that she could have a present soon, but not quite yet. I gave a hoarse laugh. “I’m not the oracle, Edie.”
She softened a bit. What else could she do? She hung her head, her shallow chest rising and falling, as if she were about to faint. “It’s just—” Something was clearly bothering her.
“What, Edie?”
She looked up soulfully into my eyes. “What if he’s met someone, someone he likes better?”
“That’s not the impression I got.”
“Honestly?”
“Would you like me to talk to him?”
She didn’t answer straightaway. Her top teeth sank into her bottom lip. Chewing. Thinking.
“I’m seeing him this afternoon.”
The corners of her eyes flickered, and she broke into a radiant smile. “Would you?”
I smiled back, racking my brains how best to steer the conversation. Before I had a chance, Edie drank up, stood up. “Hell, I have to go,” she said, “I’m going to be late picking up the kids from Mum’s.”
Furious with myself for missing my chance, I said I’d see her out.
“Thanks for being a pal.” She gave me a big hug, her scent enveloping me in spring flowers and neroli. “And, God, I’m so sorry,” she said, wide-eyed. “Here’s me blithering on about my relationship problems, completely forgetting you. How are things?”
“Oh, good days, bad days.” Shit days, actually.
My hand hovered over the doorknob. Edie waited, the tap of her sandal against the polished wooden floorboard her only giveaway that she was impatient to leave. Time to go for it.
“Did Chancer ever meet a woman called Drea Temple?”
Edie put a hand to her chest, her porcelain features turning the colour of old cement. “Oh God, so there is someone. Where did he meet her? How long has it been going on? I knew it. I simply knew it.”
Before she had a seizure, I said, “No, no, it’s all right, Edie, I didn’t mean. I meant —” My mind scrabbled for a rational explanation. I was horribly conscious that Edie was hanging on my every syllable. “Her name came up in a random conversation,” I said clumsily. “You know how it is.”
Breath seeped out between her lips like a slowly deflating balloon. “You completely had me there,” she said, with a jittery laugh.
“So, the name doesn’t ring a bell?”
She shook her head slowly; the way people do when asked for directions and they haven’t a clue. “No. Why?”
“She was a friend of Zach’s a long time ago. I wondered whether Chancer knew her too.”
“Well, if he did, he never mentioned her to me.”