“I’m sorry I’m late,” I say as I rush into the gym cafe the following morning.
“You okay?” asks Beth, with a concerned expression.
I thought I’d done a pretty good job of concealing the bags weighing my eyes down, and hoped that lashings of mascara would have disguised their red rims. I’d eventually fallen asleep on the couch and have vague recollections of Nathan helping me into bed in the small hours. He’d held me as I silently cried.
“The last twenty-four hours have been … well…” I can’t even finish the sentence because I don’t know what to say. Should I start with us not getting the Japan job and Nathan wanting to buy it and do it ourselves? Or should I skip straight to the part where the ghost of my former husband is seemingly posting on Facebook?
“What’s happened?” asks Beth.
“I’ve had a problem with the car this morning,” is all I feel confident enough to say without breaking down. It’s not a lie.
“Oh,” is all she says.
I force a smile. “Yeah, I woke up to two flat tires, so I had to call Range Rover out and they ended up putting it on a truck and taking it away. Not a great start to my morning.”
“And I bet new tires don’t come cheap.”
“Exactly.”
“From the look of you, I thought you were going to say something had happened with Nathan. How did that go? Is everything okay?”
“Mmm,” I mumble, for fear that if I say any real words, my thin veneer will crack.
“So, was he able to justify his actions?” she presses. “Did you hit him with everything you had?”
I nod. “He says he’s not having an affair.”
“Well, I could have told you that much,” she says, her features pinched. “When will these men take ownership of their actions? When will the women who sleep with married men hold their hand up for the part they play? They all think they can do what they like, regardless of who it hurts, but there have to be consequences. They have to be ready for that.”
Her eyes drift off and I imagine her picturing her ex with his new girlfriend, wondering if they’re even aware of the pain they’ve caused.
“It’s a good job I believe in karma,” she says. “What goes around, comes around. Somehow or another they’ll pay.”
I force a smile, wondering what purpose that serves if the damage has already been done.
“You want to believe him, don’t you?” she asks, looking at me.
“Of course,” I say. I don’t know what to believe anymore, is what I mean.
I want to tell her about Tom being on Facebook. I can’t stop thinking about it, imagining him out there, living a life without us. The thought is totally incomprehensible, yet I’d rather it be true than have the Facebook Support Team be right when they said it must just be a technical glitch.
“I’m afraid there are one thousand and forty-five Tom Evanses on the site,” their operative had said last night.
But only one of them is presumably dead, I’d wanted to say.
“Is there nothing you can do?” I’d pleaded instead. “Can you at least tell me where this Tom Evans, my Tom Evans is posting from?”
“For reasons of confidentiality, we’re unable to do that,” he’d said. “Have you tried contacting him directly?”
I couldn’t say no. That would just make me look insane. Why would I have contacted them to ask where he was, before asking him? But that’s what I’d done—because I was too scared to go the other route, too terrified that I might get a reply.
“Did you hear back on Japan?” Beth asks now, and I’m grateful to her for changing the subject.
“We didn’t get it. The developer pulled out of buying the site.”
“I’m sorry—you really wanted that, didn’t you?”
I nod. “So much so that Nathan almost convinced me that we should buy it and build it ourselves.”
“Wow,” she says, looking at me in awe. “Are you going to?”
I shake my head. “No, AT Designs means too much to me. It was created by Tom and me, and if anything happened to it because of a bad decision I made, I’d feel I’d let him down in the worst possible way.”
I think back to how hard we’d both worked to get the company off the ground, even when Tom was still holding down a full-time job as a civil engineer.
It had long been a dream of mine to start my own interiors company and just after we found out I was pregnant with Sophia, Tom convinced me that it was time to turn it into a reality. I put my card in shop windows, dropped leaflets, designed a website; anything to get my name out there.
A couple of nearby residents commissioned me to redesign a room or two, and a local playschool asked me to create a new library space for the children. There was no real money in it though, as by the time I finished hand-painting a life-size farmyard mural on the wall, I was out of pocket, but the look on their faces was reward enough for me in the beginning.
Once Sophia arrived, I spent every minute that she slept tiptoeing my way through the designs and ideas that were strewn on the floor of the back room of our flat. But there still wasn’t enough time to get everything done before she woke up again and I’d often find myself awake at two in the morning, playing catch up. One night when the hormones and tiredness had got the better of me, Tom had held me in his arms and promised to be around more than he already was.
“But you can’t,” I’d cried. “You’re busy enough with your own work. I can’t expect you to do any more than you’re already doing.”
“I’ll quit,” he’d said. “I don’t want to be a civil engineer for the rest of my life.”
“Quit?” I’d said, panicking. “But we need your money coming in. AT is barely making anything.”
“So, we’ll use my inheritance,” he’d said. “It’s what Mum and Dad would have wanted.”
“All of it?” I’d asked.
He’d grimaced. “I’ll put a little bit by, just in case Daniel ever manages to turn his life around.”
“But if your parents had wanted to leave some for your brother they would’ve.”
“Yes, but they based their decision on the life he’s leading now,” he’d said. “If he comes out of prison at some point and sorts himself out, then I know they’d want me to help him.”
“Do you think that’s likely to happen?” I’d asked, careful to tread lightly, knowing that his brother’s life choices had brought shame and embarrassment on the family.
“It might,” he had said. “You’d have to know Daniel to see the potential. He’s just somehow got caught up in doing bad things.”
Tom was a good man and our achievements had been a source of great pride to him. I still feel an enormous sense of responsibility to him, and to his parents, to ensure that it always remains so.
I look at Beth. “Maybe if there wasn’t all this other stuff going on, I might have been convinced. But right now, I just can’t see the wood for the trees. Everything feels so complicated.”
“With Nathan, you mean?”
“It just all feels a bit too much to deal with.”
Beth opens her mouth to speak but appears to think better of it.
“So, how’s things with you?” I ask. “Did you think anything more about Millie’s dad?”
“Mmm, she brought it up again at the weekend,” she says. “I’ve had a chat with her, just to see how she feels about it all and whether she really wants to know more about him.”
“And she does?”
“That certainly seems to be the way it’s looking,” she says. “And I suppose I want to know where he is and what he’s doing too.”
I hear my phone ringing in my bag and immediately feel my pulse quicken, wondering if it’s Nathan, the office, or Olivia’s school. Since when did I want to avoid so many people?
It’s an unknown number and I force myself to answer it. “Hello,” I say gingerly, alert to the potential bad news it could be bringing to my door.
“Mrs. Davies?” asks a male voice.
I hesitate before answering. Only cold callers would refer to me so formally. “Yes,” I say, through a resigned sigh.
“It’s Mark Edwards at Range Rover. Just to let you know that your car’s all ready for you. I’m afraid we’ve had to replace all four tires.”
I resist the temptation to say, I bet if it had been Mr. Davies you’d been dealing with, it would only have been two.
“Why? What was the problem?” I ask instead.
“Well, the two front tires were already flat, as you could see, but by the time the car reached us, both rear tires were on their way as well.”
“That’s ridiculously unlucky,” I say, a tad sarcastically.
“Indeed,” he says. “You might want to rethink where you park it in future.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because it appears that all four tires were slashed with a knife.”
A chill runs through me as I imagine someone systematically working their way around the car, thrusting a blade into the rubber.
“You’ve gone white,” says Beth, as I numbly end the call. “What is it?”
I force a smile. “That’s probably because they told me how much the car was going to cost.”
“That’ll teach you for buying one for the same money that you could buy a house,” she says, laughing.
“Indeed,” I say, ashamed at the comparison.
I know she’s only joking, but the comment makes the divide between our lifestyles painfully obvious. Perhaps everything that’s been happening lately is my payback; a warning not to take anything for granted.
“So, what’s the next step?” I ask, in an attempt to bat my paranoia away. “How are you going to go about finding Millie’s father?”
“Well, I’m not sure the official channels are going to be much help. I applied for child maintenance a few years ago and they opened a file, but they never managed to track him down. I don’t know if they keep looking—I don’t suppose they have the time.”
“And if someone doesn’t want to be found…”
“True enough,” she says. “But I did have a look on the internet, with the little information that I have.”
I reach into my bag for a pen and pad, relishing the idea of having someone else’s problem to focus on instead of my own.
“So, what have you got so far?” I ask, turning to a fresh page and writing Beth before underlining it.
She smiles wryly. “So, he had his own business.”
“And?” I ask.
“Surprise, surprise, it no longer exists.”
“Okay, what about his parents?” I ask.
There’s a flash of something in her eyes, but as quick as it came, it’s gone again. “I didn’t meet either of them, so no leads there.”
I wrinkle my nose. “Did he have any hobbies? Any places he used to go.”
“He worked really hard and was away a lot. He was hugely ambitious, and he wanted the best for us.” She laughs hollowly. “Or so I thought.”
She stops and looks lost in her thoughts, as if it’s only just dawning on her that when he said he was working, he was actually with the other woman.
“Did you own a place together?” I ask, in an attempt to bring her back.
“We didn’t get that far,” she says. “He was just about to move in with me.”
“So, there’s no paper trail at all?” I say.
She shakes her head ruefully. “It’s embarrassing. How can I know so little about my child’s father?”
“Come on,” I say. “Don’t beat yourself up. It’s just one of those things, though I do hope you know his name.”
She looks at me witheringly, but there’s humor in her eyes. “Yes,” she says. “And his date of birth, actually.”
“See,” I jest. “What else do you need to know?”
She rolls her eyes, but I can see that she appreciates me adopting a more lighthearted approach.
“So, come on,” I say, my pen poised. “What’s his name?”
“Thomas Evans,” she states boldly.
I can see her lips moving and hear a muffled sound, but I can’t even begin to compute what she’s saying. My head fills up with a hotness that feels like it’s trapped, with no way out. I need air to breathe, but I panic that I can’t take it in quickly enough.
I want to throw myself across the table and hold a hand to her mouth, so that she can’t say anything more. But because I don’t, she continues, blissfully unaware.
“Date of birth, 21 May 1976.”
Her head tilts to the side, a look of concern on her face, and I try to stand up, but feel so dizzy that I immediately fall back down again. I can’t breathe, my lungs won’t let me, and my body burns.
“But … but it can’t be,” I falter. “That’s not possible.”
The last thing I remember is Beth mouthing, “Are you okay?” seemingly in slow motion. Then everything goes black.