Alexa was gorgeous. Of course. If you take the average pregnant person and try to imagine the complete opposite, you have her. Tall, slim, impossibly glossy long hair with gold highlights that bounce around as she wanders about in intricately patterned harem pants. That first night we met, at an end-of-year function for Stephen’s business, she had just returned from a mountain trek and thirteen-day scuba diving course and reeked of the calm confidence that it seems possible to acquire when you have more than fourteen and a half minutes a day to devote to your own interests.
Brought back to the present with a shock, I could taste my dinner bubbling up into my oesophagus at the thought of her. A scream forced its way up. I grabbed the china vase from the bedside table and hurled it at the wall. ‘How could you?’ I screamed. ‘How the hell could you do that?’ I squeaked, more softly the second time. The vase didn’t even break, rebounding with a thud on the carpet.
He stared at me. ‘You’ll wake Thomas. Do you know how long it took me to get him to sleep?’
I stood in shock, then ran for our bedroom. A pile of his clothes lay in a heap on the end of the bed. As I curled up, I realised the whole room smelt of the aftershave I had been buying him for the last ten years.
I woke up a couple of hours later to the sound of Thomas and Stephen in the kitchen, clattering spoons into bowls as they assembled breakfast. I stretched, feeling the bones click back into place in my neck, and barrel-rolled off the bed. My baby seemed to stretch too, contorting as she found her way back to the centre of my upright body.
I edged the kitchen door open. Thomas was perched on his step stool, pouring milk into the bowl, and on to the bench, from which it was dripping on to the floor. The kettle was boiling and our dog, Waffle, nudged her empty water bowl across the tiles with her greying nose. Stephen grabbed the milk bottle from Thomas. ‘I told you to be careful. Let me.’
‘I do it!’ Thomas glared but looked chastened. Stephen rarely snapped at him. His father tried to guide the pour. He looked up as he heard me shuffling in, my legs numb from the baby cutting off my blood supply. He quickly turned his gaze to Thomas again.
I watched the pair of them as Stephen positioned Thomas into his chair at the dining table. More cereal was spilling down the front of his T-shirt. I handed Stephen a cloth to wipe him, but he looked flummoxed, so I snatched it back and dabbed at the mess.
‘I’m going to ask my mum to take Thomas out for a while, so we can talk today.’ I kept my voice calm, channelling the woman who fronted the kids’ TV show that kept Thomas occupied for a sanity-saving hour each Saturday morning. My husband might be trying to ruin our lives, but I was going to keep this from Thomas – as well as everyone else – for as long as I could.
Stephen swallowed, and focused on my hand blotting Thomas’s T-shirt. ‘I have to go to the site this morning. I can come back about eleven.’
I kissed Thomas’s forehead. ‘That’s fine. Thank you.’
We were talking to each other as if we were business acquaintances, who didn’t particularly like each other.
He had barely made a dent in his toast when he stood up and stuffed his keys and phone into a bulging pocket, whistling for Waffle to follow him into his truck.
‘Say goodbye to Dad,’ I prompted Thomas, who was watching a shimmer of sunlight dance across the wall. I was not going to miss an opportunity to remind Stephen of what he would be leaving behind. I would have pulled out my sonography scans and dangled them in front of him if I could.
‘You shirt,’ Thomas pointed at my front. I was still wearing Stephen’s baggy grey T-shirt, which I’d had on the day before. There was a saucy smear across the front, where Thomas had wiped his face as I hugged him after a messy afternoon tea. He raised a puzzled eyebrow.
I arranged my face into as neutral an expression as I could manage. ‘I didn’t have time to get changed.’ I shot him what I hoped was a reassuring smile. He was frowning. It was time to deploy my best upbeat your-mother-is-definitely-not-falling-apart voice again. If I presented him with the wrong type of jam with his toast, it could throw him off for the whole day. Now I was turning up in day-old clothes and acting like his father was a stranger in our kitchen. ‘Everything is okay, darling. You’re going to Gran and Granddad’s this morning. That will be fun, won’t it?’
By 11.30, there was still no sign of Stephen. I paced the house, watching the driveway. Every time I tried to return to my desk, the words on the computer screen seemed to flitter in front of me. I was scanning a press release for the third time, still with no idea what it said, when my phone vibrated. A message from Stephen at last. I gritted my teeth as I opened it. ‘Can’t make it back this morning.’
I stabbed at the phone to call him. It rang and rang before voicemail clicked in: ‘Hi, it’s Stephen Murchison, I can’t come to the phone …’
‘You can’t or you won’t?’ I growled at it and tried again. And again. At the sixth time, he answered. ‘I cannot talk to you right now,’ he hissed. ‘I’m on site.’
Had I always been married to such a selfish coward? Did he think I could just put my own life on hold until he had time to spare for me?
‘You were meant to be coming back here at eleven.’ My anger reverberated through my body so hard I thought he must be able to hear it down the phone line. ‘I need to know. Is that it for our marriage? For our kids? How long has this been going on for?’ I spat the words at my computer screen.
‘I don’t know.’
There was a sound of movement, a door slammed. He must have gone to sit in his truck.
‘A month maybe. Two. I’ve developed feelings for her.’ His voice trailed off as if I was meant to just accept it. Like, oh you’re in love with her? That’s all right, then. Please carry on. Don’t let me be an impediment to your happiness.
Instead, I let the silence hang between us. He might as well have been speaking a different language. The Stephen I knew thought ‘feelings’ should be approached in the same way as a particularly virulent infectious disease. The first time I’d told him I loved him, he said: ‘me too’. We’d got engaged while on holiday in Hawaii because, watching loved-up Japanese couples exchanging vows on the sand, he’d said: ‘I suppose you want to do that, too?’
At last, he sighed. ‘I’ll move out while we figure out what to do.’
‘You’ll move out?’ I was suddenly shouting so loud it made my throat hurt. ‘Damn right you’ll move out. I never want to see your face again.’
I pressed the button to end the call, my hands shaking as if I had downed twenty-six coffees. A month or two? In that time, I had dragged him to midwife appointments, he had sat with me while I agonised over paint colours for the new baby’s room and we had planned Thomas’s third birthday party. We’d even pored over which species of dinosaur Thomas might like on his cake. All that time he had been talking to someone else, confiding in her? The crushing weight of the loss was overwhelming.
Every aspect of my life had been moulded to fit our family. Before Thomas was born, I had wanted to use an inheritance from my grandfather to set up a little yoga studio but Stephen had argued it was too risky to both be self-employed. Then, I’d passed up promotions so that I could work from home to be there for Thomas. For a while, I’d provided the only income as he channelled everything he earned into growing his business and paying the staff (he’d employed prematurely). We’d even decided the time was right to try for a second baby this year because he’d taken on a big contract that would double his workload in twelve months’ time.
I gritted my teeth. If he wanted to destroy our little family, I was going to make him pay.