By the time I pulled into London Euston I’d called Thomas ten times and was verging on hysteria. If he wasn’t dead, he’d better have a bloody good excuse.
When I turned the corner of my road and saw his car parked up outside the flat, I felt all the air rush out of me. It didn’t rule him out of having had an accident, or worse. But it did mean that he was there, we were still together, and he hadn’t done the dirty on us with Mum’s money, because rightly or wrongly that’s all I could think about.
Shame flooded through me as I recalled the already hazy journey. I was unable to believe that the thoughts I’d allowed to infiltrate my mind were truly mine. Seeing him come out the front door, with his overnight holdall slung casually over his shoulder, I went to call out. But I stopped, to give myself just another few seconds to pull myself together. To wipe off the guilt, that I was sure would be obvious, from my face.
His face broke into a wide grin as he reached his car and I wondered if he’d already seen me, but was pretending not to, so as not to spoil the surprise. I began to walk faster, thwarted by my case’s wheels having to negotiate the uneven sidewalk.
I stopped dead still in my tracks as Thomas leaned into the passenger window of the car. I wanted to see him talking to a male colleague or perhaps even my mum, who he’d thoughtfully taken out to lunch to celebrate the deal. I wanted to see anyone apart from the attractive blond woman he was kissing.
Feeling as if I’d been punched in the stomach, I instinctively crouched down behind a hedge on someone’s path. I don’t know if it was because my legs collapsed beneath me or that I was scared of being seen. How would anything ever be all right again, if I acknowledged what I’d witnessed? If Thomas knew I’d caught him out.
I needed to think before I acted, but I didn’t have much time. I heard the car start up and gathered my thoughts. Think. Think. Think.
I stood up, just in time to see the car go past, the smiling woman looking out the passenger window at me as she went by. There was no recognition from her. No appreciation that the man she had just kissed was my boyfriend. All she would have seen in me was a young woman who was returning from a trip, perhaps glad to be home and looking forward to seeing her lover. All I saw in her was the bitch who had just taken him away.
Already breathless from shock and grief, I scurried across the road as quickly as my lead legs would carry me. I had a momentary thought, as I put my key in the door, that he might have changed the locks, but why would he do that? He was cheating. He wasn’t trying to take my life away from me, although I feared it was one and the same thing.
I rushed through to the spare bedroom, expecting to see his treasured possessions filling the familiar space, but nothing had changed since I was last there. My wardrobe, where his clothes had hung happily with mine, was devoid of his shirts and trousers. Only the faintest scent of him remained, to prove he ever existed.
My ravaged brain couldn’t compute what was going on. Had he gone away for a couple of days with his mistress? Was he going to come back on Friday, pretending that all was well and assuming that I’d be none the wiser? Or had I just witnessed him walking out of my life?
I ferreted for my phone in my bag, but I was all fingers and thumbs as my heart beat against my chest. Tears clouded my eyes and my judgment.
“I don’t care about her,” I said out loud. “We can get through this, just please come back home.”
I called him again, and the by-now-familiar woman’s voice read out the banal announcement.
“You need to call me, right now,” I hissed, barely able to breathe. “If I don’t hear from you in the next hour, I’m going to call the police.”
I slid down the wall onto my bedroom floor, the room which just a few days ago had been where we’d made love, where he’d said he wanted to live together, where he begged me not to leave him. Had it all been a lie?
No, it couldn’t have been. He couldn’t have pretended to love me that well. He couldn’t have faked what we had. It was impossible.
But then I remembered his parting shot. Had it always been about the money?
I pictured my mum’s smiling face, excited about restoring her beloved house to its former glory. I could see her in the warm glow of her kitchen, the room where dad used to whirl her around, and could hear her saying that she’ll never leave. That all the time she had him, me, and the beat in her heart, she would never let anything happen to the house we all loved.
My throat contracted and I raced to the bathroom, where my stomach was quick to dispel the sandwich I’d managed on the train. With my head still hanging over the toilet, I noticed that where there’d been two toothbrushes neck to neck in the cup on the basin, only one now remained.
As soon as I felt able to, I called Mum, not knowing what I was going to say.
“Has the money definitely left your account?” I blurted out before she’d even finished reciting her phone number.
“Oh, hello, darling,” she said, sounding perplexed. “Yes, why?”
“But have you actually checked?” The panic in my voice made me sound more cutting than I meant to be.
“Yes, why?” she asked hesitantly, feeding off my own distress. “Has Thomas not received it? I thought you said he’d received it.”
I was stumped to know what to say for the best. Should I tell her I lied? Was there any chance that it had somehow gone to someone else’s account by mistake? Could Thomas be exonerated of any wrongdoing, apart from kissing a woman who wasn’t his girlfriend? Should I tell her that I think we’ve been scammed? Did she need to know that every penny she had is probably on its way to Rio de Janeiro?
If you’re about to break the heart of the person you love most in the world, how’s best to do that?
I knew I couldn’t do it over the phone—she deserved more than that, so I jumped in my car and spent the time driving there going over and over what was happening. Trying to think of a single logical reason why Thomas would have done what he’d done. My own pain paled into insignificance when I measured it against my mum’s. Her lost pride. Her broken promise to my dad. The future that she thought she had, snatched away from her …
And it was all my fault.