CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

With Ben away, Louise spent more time working her way through Laura’s diary. She made good on her plans to divorce Alex, and Louise wasn’t sure how she felt about that. Mainly, she was just sad for both of them.

Maybe it was the diary, or maybe it was the relentless grey of the winter that made her feel this way, but Louise felt bleak and empty. Maybe it was just that reading about Laura and Alex’s split and the resulting fallout was too close to home, especially as her solicitor had let her know just before Christmas that the finalising of her divorce should happen in the new year sometime.

Or maybe she was just missing Ben.

She felt better when he was around—like there wasn’t a hole inside, one that gnawed at its own edges, trying to increase its perimeter.

It would be better when he was back from his sister’s. She would start to feel herself again. Maybe she would even feel more like the version of herself she was in her daydreams, the woman who was perfect for Ben, who didn’t have a past that kept knocking down their attempts to build something more than friendship.

So, when Laura’s divorce made her feel too maudlin, sometimes she skipped and skimmed the entries. She really didn’t need the details, did she? She was living it herself.

But then, one evening, an entry made her stop dead in her tracks:

3rd March, 1956

I’ve just received the most awful, awful news. Jean Blake killed herself last night. I was walking past the news stand on my way into town to lunch with a friend and I saw the headline.

I felt so sick I couldn’t even buy a copy, but when I arrived at the Savoy, it was all Brenda could talk about. How shocking it was, how sudden. How devastated poor, poor Dominic must be … (Not that she actually knows him.) And the poor, precious child, only just a toddler, now left without a mother. How could a woman leave a child like that? What must have driven her to it?

I sank down in my seat and ate my lunch, nodding and murmuring in all the right places. Even though I’ve had no contact with Dominic or Jean in almost two years, I had the horrible feeling I could answer Brenda’s questions.

What had driven poor, unstable Jean Blake to take her own life?

I had the horrible feeling the answer might be that I had.

How feelings and fact line up, I don’t know, because it shouldn’t be that way, shouldn’t be that way at all. I was the one left alone and grieving. She won, she had him. He chose her.

But then I thought maybe he didn’t choose her. Maybe Jean had worked out that he chose the child, Caroline, instead. I’ve always wondered whether Jean got pregnant to keep him with her, because Dominic had always said they’d decided to wait a few years, until his hectic work schedule calmed down, but it had happened early. Maybe Jean woke up one day and realised she’d made herself a prison.

I feel wretched, even though I did the right thing. And then, underneath that sticky, heavy guilt is something else …

Something warmer, like the sun coming out, and I despise myself for feeling this way.

Part of me is happy.

Even though a husband has lost his wife, even though a child has lost her mother. Am I monster? Or am I merely human—and all that means: weak, broken, selfish?

Because, once the initial shock has worn off, all I can think of is that Dominic is now free and our time will come soon.