Monika assessed her face in the mirror. Her cheek was red but could be covered with make-up. Her black hair curled around her oval face and her large brown eyes stared back at her like portals of warm fur. Her lips were full and rounded; Tony had said he loved kissing them. He still did.
She had her mother’s eyes. She stared at them now and disappeared into them. She wouldn’t cry. People here treated her as if she was stupid, because she was beautiful. She had an honours degree in Law from the University of Riga, in Latvia, which she’d never used. Instead, she was the embodiment of the stereotypical younger woman who seeks a rich, older husband, and she hated it. She wished she could, for a moment, step out of her skin, and surprise everybody.
In a few short years her life had been reduced to the status of Tony’s trophy wife. She turned up on his arm at parties and she talked to his friends. She suffered the lust of his friends and associates, like Jeremy Moore, and she decorated her husband like the baubles on a Christmas tree. Everything was prettier with lights on, even a bastard like Tony.
Her body froze when she heard his voice downstairs. He was on the phone. No doubt to Jeremy, his appeaser and partner in everything. She knew this because of the way his voice changed. In the short time she’d got to know her husband she’d learned to read him like a book. His voice, and all the tones and oscillations therein, depended upon whom he was addressing. And the only people on the planet who Tony fawned to were Jeremy and Alex. Everybody else he spoke to like chattels.
It was a pity that Jeremy was so shallow because his children were charming. They were young enough not to be totally screwed up by their parents, though they all showed signs of it. It was one of the reasons she remained childless. Anybody with the arrogance to think they could create another human being, in their image, must be crazy.
Until she met Henry.
Even she couldn’t get over the cliché of a bored housewife falling for her luxury kitchen fitter, but it had happened that way and nobody would ever understand. Of course, at first, any woman faced with Henry Nelson’s physique, in their kitchen, all muscles, blue eyes and blond hair, stripping cupboards and building things, would stop to enjoy the view, but it was when he opened his mouth that the magic happened. He was kind, intelligent and gentle.
She took a picture of the mark on her face and sent it to Henry, then waited.