“Oh, Nick. You fucking bastard,” I breathe.
I tap my finger on the urgent DHL package Emma has left out on her desk for the courier to take to Nick for signature. He’s not at home in Wiltshire with his ditzy wife and cute photogenic children. The lying shit is in bloody Cornwall getting his—forgive the pun—rocks off.
Well, aren’t you a quick learner, Nick Lyon. Amazing just how fast you’ve got the hang of this lying-through-your-teeth shit. You’re right up there with the pros.
I do what I always do when the Big Bad World gets too much for me: I decamp to my parents’ for the weekend.
There’s something deeply reassuring about sleeping in my tiny single bed with its Barbie-printed sheets. My old, cuddly teddy bear (from Harrods, natch) is waiting for me on top of my pillow, still wearing the holey sweater I knitted for him the Christmas I turned ten on my new automatic knitting machine (Nagged for: 364 days. Used: 47 minutes). I wouldn’t mind growing up if it was all late nights watching cartoons and chocolate ice cream for dinner, like you think it’s going to be when you’re seven. I just don’t want to end up like my mother, stuck with a ton of carrots to peel and an ironing basket the size of Everest. Where’s the fun in that?
By the time I show my face downstairs on Saturday, it’s past eleven. My mother is at Sainsbury’s. (Planning Your Meals: another very good reason not to grow up. I prefer to hit the local 7-Eleven approximately fifteen minutes prior to dinner. Nick practically had a coronary when he opened my fridge to make a post-shag sandwich and beheld the sum total of my larder: two out-of-date plain live yogurts left over from my last failed diet, three cans of Red Bull, and, in the freezer section, a half-empty bottle of vodka.) My mother actually aspires to be a Waitrose shopper, but she can’t bear to pay their prices when Sainsbury’s does the same things so much cheaper. She consoles herself with the fact that at least she hasn’t sunk as low as Asda.
Dad, however, is very much in evidence: propped up at the breakfast bar with bloody Libby Newcombe.
“Men give love to get sex,” Dad opines as I walk in. “Women give sex to get love. There’s your battle of the sexes in a nutshell.”
“But Vinny, he said I was The One!” Libby wails.
“They all say that Before. Hello, love,” Dad says to me as I slouch toward the kettle. “Libby and young Martin have just split up, I’m afraid. Made off with the fancy piece from the Duke’s Head. She’s a bit upset about it, they’ve been together since New Year’s Eve.”
“She should be bloody grateful,” I mutter.
“The thing is, Libby, love, you’ve got to play a bit hard to get,” Dad says, resuming his role as Dr. Phil with disturbing ease. “Chap’s not going to pay for the cow if he’s getting the milk for free, is he?”
I’m not sure I can deal with this fresh insight into the dynamic of my parents’ marriage this early in the morning. Early for a Saturday, I mean.
I slouch back out of the kitchen with my tea, once Dad remembers his manners and gets up to make it for me.
And thus passes the rest of the weekend. I skulk, mooch, and saunter, occasionally interspersing this frenzied activity with a bout of ambling, meandering, roaming, or rambling, as the mood takes me. There are even moments of slumping and drooping, just for variety.
I check for text messages so often I’m surprised my phone doesn’t howl “Gerroff Me!” and leap out of sight behind the sofa when I walk in the room.
On Sunday I call Amy. “What?” she says sharply.
“Way to go, Ames. I love you, too.”
“I’m waiting for a call,” she snaps.
“Who from?”
She hesitates. “Terry, if you must know.”
“You’re at your parents’ again, aren’t you?” I speculate.
“How did you know?”
I sigh. “Lucky guess. So, did Terry say he’d ring you?”
“No. But he might.”
“Does he usually call you at weekends?”
“Does Nick usually call you?”
There’s a silence as we contemplate our respective adulterers. Not for the first time, I am struck by our self-deluding masochism. There are plenty of men out there having affairs with married women, but I bet they’re not benched at their parents’ houses chewing their fingernails back to the elbows waiting for her to ring. I bet they’re having a good ol’ time, hanging with their mates down the pub, sinking a few while they wait till it’s late enough to go clubbing, where they’ll undoubtedly end up pulling a fit teenager and getting laid just to keep their hand in. Sure as shit they’re not riding the pine in suburbia.
“Are you going to the Law Society dinner next month?” Amy asks suddenly.
“Hadn’t thought about it. Probably. Why?”
“Well. It’s plus spouses,” she says meaningfully.
So Nick will bring the ditz. “Maybe we can take turns with him,” I suggest.
“You won’t be so flippant after four years,” Amy reproves. “Look, I have to go. Terry might be trying to get through. I’ll talk to you on Monday.”
I wander disconsolately into the kitchen, where my mother is peeling potatoes for Sunday lunch. There’s no way I’ll still be doing this in four years. Jesus, I don’t intend to still be doing it in four months. I’m not going to end up like Amy, wasting my life waiting for a man who’s never going to make the break. It should never have got this intense in the first place. It was supposed to be a bit of fun, good conversation, and some way-fantastic sex. I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with the bastard.
“Don’t hover, Sara, it’s distracting,” says my mother.
“Sorry.”
She hands me a knife and points to the vegetable rack. “Might as well make yourself useful with the sprouts now you’re here.”
For ten minutes or so, we peel and chop in silence. I can’t say it’s companionable; my relationship with my mother is, at best, a wary truce. At worst, it puts the Middle East conflict to shame.
“Man trouble, is it?” My mother sniffs.
She reaches past me to put another potato in a saucepan of cold water. “You’ve been mooching round the house all weekend with a face like a wet Sunday. That phone is practically attached to your hip. You were like this over young Martin, as I recall.”
“I was not!”
“Have it your own way.”
I slice sprout stalks with unnecessary vigor.
“Not interested, is he?” my mother says after a moment. Scrape, peel.
“Who?”
She plops another spud in the pan. “The man you’re eating your heart out over.”
“Yes, he’s interested, thank you,” I say, stung.
“Married, then?”
“Dammit, Mum! Now look what you made me do!”
“Don’t bleed on the sprouts, dear.” She hands me a piece of kitchen towel; I ignore it and suck my finger. “Girls your age don’t choose to spend the weekend with their parents unless he’s either not interested or married.”
I’m shocked, both by the unexpected perspicacity of what she’s said and the fact that she’s said it at all. My mother and I don’t go for soul-baring and girlie intimacy. She tells me she loves me with Hermès scarves and Prada backpacks. I show her I love her by wearing them.
I’ve always envied Amy’s warm, close relationship with her mother. She told me once that when she goes home at the weekend, her mother sits on the loo seat and chats to her while she’s in the bath. The image of cozy familiarity it conjured up made me so jealous I couldn’t speak to her for a week.
My mother never asks me about my love life; presumably because she has a pretty good idea of its nature. And in fairness, I’ve always returned the compliment.
“Married men aren’t fair game, young lady,” she says sharply.
“Mum, I know—”
“Wanting someone is no grounds for trampling all over another woman’s marriage. And falling in love is no excuse either. Pass the salt cellar, please.” She grinds with swift, angry movements. “We all have choices. Men are fools. It doesn’t take much to tempt them. It’s up to us not to let each other down.”
I don’t know why she sounds like she’s talking from experience. My dad would never cheat on her. He said so.
“And they never leave their wives,” she adds coldly. “Whatever sweet words they tell you to get you into bed. Remember that.”
“I’ve no idea what you mean,” I say. “Is there any wine open?”
She nods, purse-lipped, toward the fridge. I pour myself a heftier glass than I want just to annoy her, and go out into the back garden. It’s surprisingly mild for March; I sit on the stone bench near the greenhouse, sipping my wine—passable, given that it came from a box, not a bottle—and enjoy the play of watery sunshine across my face. Dad has already turned the earth for his broad beans; the air smells rich and peaty. Maybe I’ll offer to help him plant them this year. I haven’t done that since I was about twelve. I used to love crouching beside him in my red wellies, pushing the big beans into the freshly tilled soil with my thumb. I remember when I was six, I couldn’t wait for them to grow, and snuck out of my room every night with a flashlight to check on them until I trod on a slug in my bare feet and screamed so loudly I woke the neighbors. My mother hates that Dad grows his own vegetables, of course; she calls it his “allotment fetish.” She thinks the neighbors will assume we can’t afford to buy them shrink-wrapped and genetically modified at the supermarket. Poor old Dad. I don’t know how he puts up with her.
I drain the wineglass and set it down on the bench. My mobile is burning a hole in my pocket. The trip to Rock might have been a last-minute thing. Maybe Nick didn’t even know about it; maybe it was all her idea. Like Valentine’s Day. It’s not as if he actually said he was going to be in Wiltshire as usual this weekend. I just assumed.
In the beginning, I never used to really think about Nick and his wife together. Now I can’t stop.
It was seeing them both at Yuzo’s. What I should have done after I bugged out of the sushi bar was take a cab home, eat a full tub of Cherry Garcia, and finish the bottle of vodka in front of The Way We Were. What I actually did was skulk around Yuzo’s for two hours in the freezing cold feeling sorry for myself and dreaming up ways to castrate the bastard with piano wire. I saw them come out, his arm wrapped protectively around her teeny-tiny shoulders. They stopped for a moment in the street and kissed. Brief, but affectionate: You could tell. He stroked her cheek afterward. Not the actions of a man who’s sleeping with his junior partner on the side. Not the actions of a man who isn’t sleeping with his wife.
Watching them, I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach. My head hurt. How could he lead me on like this; how could he lie to me like this? Make me think—
Think what, exactly?
He never said he’d leave his wife. What did you expect, you love-struck cow? That he was going to fall in love with you too, and suddenly it’d all be different?
I finger my phone through my fleece pocket. He could at least ring. That couldn’t be too hard, could it? To make one simple phone call now and again?
I should never have let it all start up again. I’d been doing fine up to that afternoon in the conference room, even if I’d nearly passed out from the pain of not peeing so he couldn’t catch me by the toilets. Well, not fine; but I’d managed to avoid being alone with him, anyway. I hadn’t slit my wrists.
And then he touches me, and every sensible, look-both-ways, self-preserving thought flies out of my head.
Some men never listen to you in bed; in the end you give up asking for what you want. It’s like when you mishear someone’s name, and you ask them to repeat themselves: Do it more than twice and it starts to get embarrassing. Why do some men always think they know what you want better than you do? You can be getting it on, moments away from orgasm, and you moan, “Right there, don’t stop!” and they think, oh, she likes that, then she’ll really like this; and they stop and do something different. I want to take out a full-page newspaper ad: When I say, “Right there, don’t stop!,” I mean, “RIGHT THERE, DON’T STOP!”
With Nick, sex just gets better every time. I’ve never felt so connected to another person in my life; it’s like he’s inside my head. But now scary, grown-up feelings have got all jumbled up with that mind-blowing sex. I don’t want to give him back anymore. I don’t want to share him. Everything’s changed. And I don’t know what to do about it.
Suddenly I desperately need to hear his voice. I just want to know he’s missing me, too. I break my cardinal rule: I drink and dial.
It rings twenty-four times before he answers. And then—
“Sara, what the hell are you doing calling me at home?”
Talk about reality check. He sounds really annoyed. Dammit, this was a fucking, fucking stupid thing to do. What was I thinking?
“Oh, God, Nick, I’m so sorry,” I say quickly. “I didn’t mean to call you; I must’ve hit redial by mistake. Jesus, I hope I didn’t cause a problem—I’m really sorry.”
To my intense relief, he actually buys it. “Never mind, I’ve done that enough times myself. Is everything OK?”
“I suppose. I’m at my parents’. Dullsville, you have no idea. They want me to come down on Easter Sunday for some village egg race or something; as if.” I pause, steeling myself to ask the question. Don’t lie to me, please don’t lie. “How’s it going in Wiltshire?”
“What? Oh, yes, Wiltshire. Fine, fine. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll see you on Tuesday—”
“Can you come round after work?”
I slam my fist against the stone bench. I hate how weak and desperate that sounds. What’s happening to me? I should be tearing him a new one right now, not going back and begging for more.
“Maybe. Look, I have to go.”
Bastard. Bastard, bastard, bastard.
Staying with a man who lies to someone else is dumb enough. Staying with a man who lies to you is just plain retarded.
Maybe he was telling the truth about Valentine’s Day; perhaps she did just turn up at his office. Which is a little out there in itself. Either she’s a suspicious bitch or their relationship isn’t quite the Cold War standoff he likes to make out. But he sure as shit lied to me about spending a long weekend alone with her in Cornwall.
And I’m not going to call him on it.
Without even noticing it happen, I’ve crossed the line. I can’t give him up now; it’s as simple as that. I want him for myself. I want him to leave his wife, walk out on his kids, move in with me, and for us to live happily ever after. I want his ring, his name, the whole shebang. Even though I know it’s selfish and wicked and will break the heart of not just his wife, but the three innocent little girls whose picture he touches, like a talisman, every time he opens his wallet.
It’s not that I don’t care. I used to think I was a decent person; before I met Nick, the worst thing I’d ever done was to back into a white van in the multistory car park and not leave a note. (Which, if you think about it, is probably just karmic payoff.)
But you can’t help who you fall in love with. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help it. It’s not as if I’ve wrecked their marriage; it’s impossible to break up a good relationship, isn’t it? If he was happy with his wife, he wouldn’t be with me in the first place. And she can’t want him to stay with her out of guilt. No woman would. What kind of secondhand relationship would that be? It’s got to be fairer to both of them if he leaves, and gives her a chance to find someone else, too. If she really loves him, she’ll want him to be happy.
I can make him happy. I understand him. I love him; and I know he loves me. He’s as good as said so. And you can’t have the kind of amazing, soul-baring sex we have if you don’t love each other, can you?
The day Nick’s due back at work, I put on a vintage black nipped-in fifties suit I know he likes, and a gorgeous apple-green bra-and-knickers set, just in case. It’s only been four days since I last saw him, but I’ve got first-date butterflies; I’m so nervy I have to reapply my lip liner twice. I even get to the office half an hour earlier than usual, and sit at my desk pretending to work while I wait for him to get in. I’ve decided I’m not going to tell him I know about Cornwall. I’m not even going to mention—
“What the hell was this all about?”
He storms into my office, slams the door, and flings something on my desk; I want to look but I can’t take my eyes off his face. I’ve never even seen him slightly angry, never mind like this. His gray eyes are cold as granite, his jaw clenched as he fights to keep his fury under control.
I flinch when he puts both palms down on my desk and pushes his face into mine.
“I’m waiting,” he spits furiously.
“Nick—someone might hear.”
“It’s a bit late now!”
I drop my eyes. My gold Estée Lauder lipstick rolls gently to a stop against my mouse mat.
When I was nine, I dropped my grandmother’s precious Royal Worcester coronation figurine on the floor. I’d taken it off the dining room mantelpiece, despite express instructions never to touch it. I stared at the broken shards on the fireplace tiles in an unthinking, blind terror, as if I could will the last few seconds not to have happened. In my mind’s eye, I ran a spool of tape backward and saw the pieces jumping back together again, becoming whole, like a cartoon. My craving was such that I could almost see them move.
What possessed me to put my lipstick in his jacket pocket? What?
A wave of heat washes through me, instantly followed by a cold sweat that chills to the bone. I concentrate very hard on not licking my dry lips, unable to tear my eyes from that small gold tube.
“I think that’s answer enough,” Nick says disgustedly.
He turns on his heel. I watch him walk toward the door, and know that if I let him leave this room now I will never have another chance.
“Where did you find it?” I ask, somehow squeezing surprise into my voice.
He freezes. “Where did I find it?”
“It’s my favorite, I’ve been looking for it everywhere.” I pick it up; my hand shakes, and I put it down again. “I thought I must have left it in the hotel the last time we stayed there; I can’t remember seeing it since then.”
For a long moment, he doesn’t move. I can’t breathe. Then he turns round, his eyes dark with suspicion.
“It kept rolling off the marble vanity in the bathroom,” I say, “so—of course!—I left it in that china tray by the television, where you always put your keys and wallet. You must have picked it up without noticing when you left in such a rush to get the last train.”
“I picked it up?”
I shrug. “You must have done. So where did you find it?”
“I didn’t,” Nick says, his eyes fast on mine. “My wife did. In my jacket pocket, when she went to get my keys.”
I don’t have to fake my appalled expression. I just have to think what will happen if he doesn’t believe me.
“What did she say?” I whisper.
“She’s my wife. She found another woman’s lipstick in my jacket pocket. What do you think she said?”
“Does she—have you—”
“Told her about us?” he asks curtly. “No. Fortunately, my wife is a very trusting woman. When I tell her an obscene pack of lies about finding lipsticks in hallways, she tends to believe me.”
I nod. I’m relieved; of course I am. Hot shame washes over me again. I’d never have believed myself capable of being this sly and manipulative. I didn’t understand how much I love him until I realized what I’d do—and what I’d put up with—to keep him. But if I naïvely thought for one moment planting a lipstick where his wife would find it would push him into choosing me, I’m certainly disabused of the idea now. He’s not going to leave his wife for me. Of course he’s not going to leave his wife. They never do.
“Nick?” I say carefully. “Are we OK?”
He hesitates. A chink opens; it’s all I need. I move out from behind my desk, aware that I look just the right side of slutty in this figure-hugging suit. My top button has come undone; I don’t bother to fix it. I let my eyes flicker to his groin just long enough to put the idea into his head. I’m close enough for him to smell my perfume and the warmth of my skin, but I leave him a little ground to cover between us. The last thing I need is for him to feel cornered.
“I’m sorry.” He sighs, wrenching his eyes from my cleavage. “I thought—I don’t know what I thought. It’s been a difficult weekend.”
“Will I see you later?”
“Not tonight. It’s not that I don’t want to—I can’t,” he says quickly. “We’re having my parents over for dinner. But tomorrow. I could come over tomorrow. As long as—”
I look away so he won’t see the resentment on my face. “The last train. Yes. I know.”
Is it my imagination, or is Nick—is he cooling on me? I can’t put my finger on it, but he just doesn’t seem as hungry as he was before. It’s nothing he’s doing—or not doing—in bed. It’s more a sense that the closer I move toward him, the further he moves away.
I push myself up on one arm as he rolls out of bed and reaches for his trousers. “You’re leaving already? It’s not even eight!”
“I can’t keep arriving home at midnight, Sara.”
I watch silently as he buttons his shirt and fastens his cufflinks. The power has inexplicably but undeniably shifted in our relationship. A couple of months ago, he was the one showering me with presents and besieging me with attention. Now, the sex is as vigorous and satisfying as it ever was, but he’s barely whipped off his condom before he’s shooting out the door.
He shrugs on his jacket and picks up his briefcase. “I’ll see you at work tomorrow.”
I nod tightly. He sighs, and comes over to sit on the bed. I pull up my knees and rest my chin on them, and he rubs my bare back as if I’m a child. “Sara, I’m sorry. I’d understand if you wanted to stop this. I wouldn’t blame you. I can’t offer you a future, or make you any promises. You deserve better than me.”
Ice trickles down my spine. Men always say that when they’re too spineless to dump you.
“I’m fine with it,” I manage. “No strings. It’s the way I like it.”
“Look. Mal’s going away the week after next, remember, this bloody sourcing trip of hers,” he says gently, turning my face toward him with his finger. “The girls will be staying with her mother. I’ve booked us into a country house hotel in Kent. Four-poster bed, hot tub, roaring fires, the works. The office is closed over Easter; we can spend five whole days and nights together. How does that sound?”
“Bliss.” I laugh, folding myself into his arms.
Of course he’s not going cold on me. I’m just being paranoid. He’d hardly arrange a romantic break away à deux if he wanted to end it.
He kisses the top of my head. “We’ll get a chance to talk. After that, we’ll know where we are.” He hesitates. “And where we’re going.”
“You have got to be kidding me!”
“Christ, Sara! What do you want me to do? Say no, sorry, darling, you can’t change your mind and come back, I’ve got a dirty weekend planned with my mistress?”
“Dammit, Nick!” I almost wrench the phone out of its socket as I storm across my bedroom. “I’ve just finished packing; the taxi is outside waiting at the curb for me! What the fuck am I supposed to do with myself for the next five days? You can’t just mess people about like this!”
“You’re right,” he snaps back. “I’m clearly making you bloody miserable. Why don’t we just call it a day and have done with it?”
“Fine. Why don’t we?”
Because we can’t.
No one knows how painful it is to be a woman in love with a man who goes home every weekend to his wife and family unless they’ve been there. It’s too easy to judge her, to paint her as a scarlet woman, a home-wrecker, a destroyer of lives. Easy too, to forget that the life she destroys most is her own. I think of him day and night. I ride a roller-coaster of emotion: rising to dizzy heights working with him during the day, and in the evenings when I steal him to my flat; through the dreaded anticipation of his going; to bleak pillow-sobbing desolation as the door shuts behind him.
“I can’t be in a position where your happiness depends on me,” he says with a sigh one day, when the tears start before he even leaves. “I don’t think I can take the responsibility.”
Despair descends on me like a cloak. Does that mean he doesn’t want to be with me after all? Is he working up to telling me it’s over?
And then I come downstairs the next morning, to find a huge cardboard box with my name on it just inside the threshold. I open it, and a chocolate-box calico kitten leaps into my lap and kneads it as if she’s been there all her life.
Now the responsibility is halved reads the note attached to her collar.
I scoop her up and take her upstairs. I was right: I will die a lonely old spinster with fourteen cats. At least my mother will have the satisfaction of being proved right.
Four months ago I believed mistresses could be divided into two groups: those who, like me, had chosen their role deliberately, and delighted in the intoxication of forbidden sex; and naïve victims—like Amy—hanging on in there, hoping for marriage.
It never occurred to me that the line between the two wasn’t fixed.
The thrill of sneaking around to meet him has long since gone. That vanished one afternoon as we checked out of Claridge’s, a giveaway two hours after checking in. As Nick paid the bill, I hung back, pretending to reapply my lipstick, feeling slightly self-conscious in my slinky dress and too-high heels. I waited until Nick had gone outside and hailed a cab, so that no one would see us emerge together. As I was about to leave, the concierge materialized at my elbow.
“Word to the wise: Tell your clients not to use their credit cards in future, love,” he murmured. “Too easy to trace.”
Nick has made a liar and a cheat out of me; he’s turned me into a person I don’t recognize, someone who can actually be mistaken for a freaking hooker.
And still I can’t give him up.
“If it wasn’t for your wife—if you weren’t married—do you think we’d be together?” I ask him casually one day.
He hesitates. “Yes, of course. But I do have a wife. And three children.”
So he does want to be with me. He must have considered the idea of leaving, then.
Which is only a small step from actually doing it, isn’t it?
“ I told you not to come,” Nick hisses.
“And I told you I was coming anyway,” I hiss back. “So nice to meet you again, Mrs. Lyon,” I say brightly, as his wife stops gossiping with Will Fisher’s dowdy wife and catches up with us. “I love your dress.”
She glances down doubtfully. “You don’t think it’s a little, well, orange? I was in Rome a few weeks ago—the Italians wear color wonderfully, don’t you think, but then the light there is so luminous—of course I got it home here, not the same light at all. I feel rather like a giant nasturtium.” She smooths her palms nervously on her skirts. “Rome is such a wonderful city, but don’t ever go over Easter weekend; just heaving with tourists, I can’t imagine what I was thinking.”
Ah, yes. My five-day romantic break, over before it began as I was about to jump into a taxi. Alas, alack, the wife is back.
“Nicholas gave me the necklace for my birthday last week. Venetian glass,” she says dreamily, fingering the delicate blown beads at her neck. “It’s antique; very extravagant of him. I don’t know what I did to deserve it, but I shall have to keep on doing it, evidently.”
I shoot Nick a vicious glance. He gave me an identical necklace as a kiss-and-make-up present after our last row. What was it, a job lot off the back of a gondola?
“I do love the Law Society dinner, every year, don’t you?” his wife prattles. “Such fun catching up with everybody. Oh, look, Nicholas, there’s Will Fisher, talking to that pretty little thing in blue; what an amazing dress, positively gravity-defying, one wonders how it stays up. He really is so naughty, his poor wife. Come on, darling, we need to go and save him from himself before he actually climbs into the girl’s cleavage. He could be lost for weeks.”
“If looks could kill,” Amy murmurs behind me as Nick’s wife drags him away.
“Give me a break,” I say, reaching for a glass of champagne from a passing waiter.
“I don’t know how you had the balls to come tonight,” she says, following suit. “I’ve never even seen Terry’s wife, never mind chatted to her over the canapés. Don’t you feel weird talking to her?”
Weird doesn’t begin to cover it. I’m so consumed with jealousy, it’s like a vise around my chest. Bile, bitter and choking, rises in my throat, and I knock back my drink to wash it away. I should never have come. I knew it would be like this; and yet I couldn’t keep away. Some insane impulse drags me back to this woman, whom I’m beginning to hate, again and again and again. Why? Why am I so obsessed with her? What is it that drives me to Google her name and order every one of her freakin’ cookbooks? Or steal the picture of her from his wallet so I can brood over it at night, and wonder what the hell he sees in her? She’s nothing to me. Nothing. A rock in the path between me and Nick.
I narrow my eyes, watching her.
“That dress is minging. So not her color. And it makes her look even scrawnier than usual.”
“I’d kill for her figure, though.” Amy sighs.
“Look at her. Hanging on to Fisher like that, bending his ear, like he even cares what she thinks. It’s not like she’s one of us, is it? She’s just a wife.”
Amy stares at me. “You’re getting very hard these days, Sara. You never used to be such a bitch. I know how you feel about Nick—no one knows better than me—but it’s not her fault she married him first. Whatever happened to poor thing, I feel sorry for her, she doesn’t understand him?”
I bite my lip. Amy’s words are a little too close to the mark for comfort. She’s right: I never used to be this way. I’m turning into a hateful, jealous cow. But this is war. I can’t afford to feel sorry for Nick’s wife now.
“She should make way for someone who does understand him,” I snap. “Why is she hanging on to him like this, making them both miserable? Why can’t she just accept that he’s moved on and let him go?”
“Maybe she still loves him.”
“Well, he doesn’t love her,” I say fiercely.
“Has he told you that?” Amy asks, surprised.
“Not in so many words. But he wouldn’t be with me if he loved her, would he?”
“Welcome to the adultery club,” Amy says cynically, clinking my glass. “To liars, cheats, and bastards everywhere. Where would we be without them?”
A man coughs behind us. “Excuse me? It’s Miss Yorke, isn’t it?” he asks Amy. “Tom Stewart. I was opposing Counsel on the Brennan case a month or two ago.”
“Oh, yes,” she says, without much interest.
“I was wondering if I could have a quick word: It’s about a feature they’re running in The Lawyer next month on collaborative law—”
Collaborative law my arse. He fancies the pants off her, it’s as clear as day. And he’s single. I wander off to work the room, giving him a clear field. It’s about time Amy had a decent, available man in her life.
“Well?” I demand when we nip to the bathroom forty minutes later for a quick debrief before the formal dinner gets under way. “Did he ask you out?”
“Yes. Invited me to a conference in Paris, actually.”
“Paris? What do you mean, Paris?”
“What do you think I mean? Paris, big city on the other side of the Channel, tall tower thing in the middle, men in stripy shirts riding around on bicycles with onions round their necks—”
“Ha bloody ha. What did you say?”
“Are you kidding me? What did you do that for? He’s cute, successful, single—”
“I couldn’t do that to Terry,” Amy says, shocked.
I want to bang my head against the mirror. “Amy, you are so sad. We are so sad. Wasting our lives on lying, cheating married men, while the good single guys are getting snapped up by girls with sense enough to know a keeper when they find one. What’s wrong with us?”
“Terry’s not like that—”
“Of course he bloody well is. They’re all like that.” I switch off the hand dryer. “I just don’t understand why Nick doesn’t leave her. You saw her; she’s so old. She’s got to be nearly forty, at least. What does he see in her, when he could be with me? It must be the children. It’s got to be. I’m sure he’d leave her otherwise. He’s practically said as much.”
Amy reapplies her lipstick carefully and presses her lips together to blend. “I really think Terry will leave soon. He’s promised, by the end of the summer—”
“Maybe I should give Nick an ultimatum,” I muse.
“You can’t. Then he’ll feel trapped, and he’ll choose her because it’s safer. You just have to wait until he’s ready to make the move.”
“But for how long? We could carry on for years like this.” I sigh. “I left a lipstick in his jacket pocket on purpose once. I thought it might, I don’t know, speed things up a bit. She found it, but they’re still together—he got out of it somehow.”
“She obviously doesn’t know about you. Look how nice she was to you earlier—”
There’s a sound from the disabled cubicle at the end. We both jump; neither of us realized anyone was in here. Shit, I hope whoever it was didn’t hear any of that. The last thing I need is for it to get back to his wife; Nick’ll go mad.
Then the ladies’ room door opens, and Emma sticks her head round the jamb. “You’d better come,” she says, her voice brittle with fear. “There’s been an accident on the stairs. It’s Mr. Lyon.”