‘But we haven’t seen him in ages,’ Kitty went on. ‘He didn’t bring me home from Granny’s once this week.’
Tess had been grateful for that. It would have been too much to find Kevin sitting in her home mere days after he’d told her he was in love with another woman. But presumably this was all part of his avoidance-of-anything-difficult plan.
Clearly, Kitty knew something was wrong. Tess was pretty sure that Zach sensed it too, even if he hadn’t said anything. She would have to talk to Kevin and get him to agree to tell their children. Left to his own devices, Kevin would just carry on saying nothing.
And wait for her to do it.
‘I’ll phone Dad now, then,’ Kitty decided.
Tess sat helplessly at the table.
Kitty was back in two minutes, the portable in her hands: ‘Dad wants to talk to you,’ she said. ‘He’s taking us out to dinner on Friday, to Mario’s!’
Mario’s was a pizza restaurant, and Kitty’s favourite for the chocolate fudge desserts.
‘Great,’ said Tess. Perhaps he was planning to do it then.
‘Tess, help me out on this,’ he pleaded, the moment she got on the phone. ‘I’m not sure how to begin,’ he said sadly. ‘I don’t want them to hate me, and I don’t want to hurt them.’
Tess flattened down all thoughts of saying ‘It’s a bit late for that now.’ She was culpable too, she knew. But despite that, it was a bit rich for him to want her to tell Zach and Kitty about Claire so that they could all be happy families together.
‘How about Friday night?’ she said pleasantly.
‘We should do it together,’ he insisted.
Tess hesitated. Perhaps that would be best. A united front might help Zach and Kitty understand that, even if parents split up, they were together for their children. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘But you’re paying.’
She might have gone to bed that night and actually slept, if Helen, Kevin’s mother, hadn’t phoned right after Kitty had been put to bed.
‘Tess, I had no idea,’ she said, her voice catching. ‘I had no idea, honestly. It’s all such a shock.’
‘I know,’ Tess soothed, wondering why she was the one doing the soothing.
‘I thought you were mad to separate in the first place,’ Helen sobbed. ‘Now look what’s happened: he’s got this new woman. Oh, Tess, it’s not right – not right for you, Kitty or Zach. Look at what all this separation nonsense has done!’
‘We both agreed to the separation, Helen, so it’s not all Kevin’s fault,’ Tess said, trying to say something comforting because she knew that Helen adored her and the children.
‘Yes, but you separated to fix things,’ wailed Helen, ‘not to find new people.’
Since this was largely what Tess herself thought, she hadn’t the heart to argue with her mother-in-law.
For the next ten minutes, Helen cried over the phone while Tess tried to find a way to end the call.
‘She’s only a young girl, you know,’ Helen sniffled. ‘I don’t know what’s got into him. Would you take him back, Tess, if it ended with this girl?’
Tess breathed out slowly. ‘Helen, love, it’s gone beyond that,’ she said, wondering if it really had gone beyond that. Could she take Kevin back if he asked?
Her mind flickered, as it so often had of late, to Cashel.
That had been real love and real passion, she realized now. A tornado of emotion compared to what she’d felt for Kevin. If she took Kevin back, it would be agreeing to a life of gentle, kind benevolence with him, the two of them returning to sharing a home but leading separate lives in so many ways.
Seeing Cashel at his mother’s funeral had made her remember the fierceness of her love for him. If only he hadn’t abandoned her, things might have been so different.
‘But now everyone knows,’ Helen went on. ‘I’ve never even set eyes on her, but when Agnes Ryan phoned me to say she’d seen my Kevin kissing this girl on the street outside the café, I was so shocked that I rang him straight up and asked him. That was the first I knew of it.’
Tess simmered. So much for the not-upsetting-you-by-bringing-Claire-out-on-the-streets-of-Avalon schtick.
‘Oh well, it’s out in the open now,’ Tess said. ‘Helen, pet, I have things to do, perhaps we can talk tomorrow?’ You might need to bail me out of jail for murdering your son for not telling his own children when other people have seen him snogging this woman in the town square.
She’d have to tell Zach now. News like that would be all around Avalon at the speed of light. Someone on Zach’s bus in the morning would be bound to have heard. He ought to know the facts himself.
Wearily, she went upstairs and knocked on Zach’s door. ‘Can I come in?’ she whispered.
As usual, a moment passed before he got up and opened the door. Tess wasn’t sure exactly what he was doing in there, but whatever it was required privacy, and it was her job to give it to him. The room smelled of socks, teenage boy and the new deodorant that he was spraying like there was no tomorrow.
‘Sure,’ he said.
He was dressed in an old faded sweatshirt and jeans. They both sat down on the bed and Tess was silent for a moment, wondering how the hell she was going to broach the subject.
‘What’s up, Ma?’ he said. ‘You look like somebody’s died.’
‘No! Don’t be silly,’ she said, going into mummy mode.
Mummy mode meant that if the sky was falling in, Mummy would say, ‘No, it’ll be fine. We’ll sort it out. There’s bound to be a solution somewhere.’
‘When your dad came over the other night, he had something important to talk about.’
A wary look stole over Zach’s face. ‘He wants to get divorced?’ he said.
‘Well, not exactly. Why did you think that?’
‘He’s been different the past month … happier,’ Zach said. ‘Before, he used to keep saying how much he missed being at home, and I felt angry at you for the whole thing. But then, he was really happy. I figured it out. He’s seeing someone else.’
Wish you’d told me, Tess thought. Then I wouldn’t have been the last to know.
‘You’re very intuitive,’ she said, patting his arm and repressing the desire to lie on his bed and cry. ‘I suppose there’s always the risk that this could happen when two people split up …’
‘But you weren’t supposed to split up. You didn’t need to split up,’ Zach said. ‘That was your idea. I heard you talking about it.’
He sounded angry now and Tess felt the weight of guilt upon her.
‘I thought it was the right thing to do,’ Tess said.
‘Not for us, it wasn’t,’ Zach said accusingly. ‘Not for me and Kitty. We were a family, before. Now we’re not.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Whatever,’ he muttered.
Tess tried to put her arm around him, but he shrugged it off.
‘Do you want to meet her?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he snapped. He put his headphones into his ears, which was teenager-speak for ‘conversation