My Husband's Secret Page 2

  I snatched a breath, felt it catch in my throat. ‘It sounds as though you’ve lost quite a bit of time.’ Despite my bone-deep regret at not being honest with Jack in the past, I was about to deceive him again. For the greater good, I told myself. We should never have broken up in the first place. He would never have left if … I slammed a door shut in my mind. ‘We did have a disagreement, and you did walk out …’ I trailed off, anxiety fluttering. I hadn’t thought this through.

  ‘I remember your birthday.’ His tone was lighter now, a note of dreamy recollection in his voice. The opioid tablets he’d taken before leaving the hospital must be kicking in. ‘You were commissioned to illustrate that book, about the lonely meerkat.’ I could tell without looking that he was smiling. ‘You were happier about that than the present I got you.’

  My mouth curved automatically in return. ‘I loved that necklace.’ I still wore it, a tiny, silver hedgehog on a delicate chain. ‘I never take it off,’ I said, realising he was recalling the last time we’d been properly happy; only a week before my world collapsed.

  Jack stiffened as I drove past the end of Atlingworth Street and the converted ground-floor flat we’d called home for nearly four years.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  Heart tripping, I said, ‘I can’t believe you’ve forgotten we don’t live here anymore.’

  ‘What?’ I could practically hear the cogs turning as he struggled to work it out. ‘Robin Hood’s Bay?’

  I exhaled and nodded. ‘We finally moved up there.’ We. Jack had only ever visited the little North Yorkshire fishing village a handful of times before my grandfather died and left his cottage to me.

  ‘That’s why we argued.’ As understanding flooded his face, guilt strained across my chest. We had disagreed about living there permanently, so far from everyone we knew and his expanding garden-design business. It’s fine for you, Caitlin, you can illustrate books anywhere, but I’ve worked hard to build the business.

  You can do it again, up there. You’ll love it, Jack, and we won’t be throwing money away on rent while we save for a mortgage, like we are here. We’ll be better off, and we’ll still be by the sea. Even closer than we are here. Not that the sea in Brighton had featured much in our daily lives, being more of a background image we took for granted.

  ‘So, we’re living there now?’

  I couldn’t bear to see his struggle to remember, waiting for memory to flow in and fill the gaps. ‘Well, I am,’ I said, truthfully. ‘You were sorting out things down here, winding up the business.’

  Something like relief flashed over his face, as though my explanation made sense. ‘And that’s where we’re going now? Robin Hood’s Bay.’

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I was remembering the quality of silence in the flat after Jack had left, how swiftly my life had lost its momentum and sense of direction as guilt and grief dragged me down. Talking to Jack, laughing or being quiet together, sharing jokes, and supporting each other had formed the rhythm of our lives for so long it had seemed impossible that I could continue to function without him.

  ‘I’m sorry I gave you a hard time about it in the first place.’ His eyes were on the road ahead now, narrowed as though trying to pinpoint the moment he’d capitulated, to visualise the series of interactions that must have taken place. I was almost on the verge of pulling the car over and blurting out the truth, unsure I could stand the tension – what had I been thinking? – when he said, ‘I’m really glad you went ahead with it, Cait.’ His smile felt like a blessing. ‘I’ve got this feeling I needed to get away, to start over, so it was obviously the right choice. Maybe the business was getting me down. I remember feeling tired all the time, as though I hadn’t been happy for a while.’

  That wasn’t true. He’d loved his job, was committed to it. A quiver passed through me as I replayed the phone call he’d made a fortnight ago, the strain and desperation in his voice – a tone I’d never heard from Jack in all the years I’d known him.

  I have to leave London, Caitlin. I made a terrible mistake. All I can do is get out.

  What’s happened?

  It’s better if I don’t say right now. I’m sorry to call you out of the blue like this but … I have to see you. I want to explain.

  I had never been more relieved that I hadn’t changed my mobile number. You sound scared, Jack.

  I’ll … I’ll be fine. No one knows where I’m going. I’ve stopped working and everything’s in place. I just … I’ve no right to ask for any favours but—

  For God’s sake, Jack, just tell me.

  I’ll be in Brighton soon. I’ll call you then.

  I didn’t even have time to tell him I was no longer living there before he hung up, and when I tried to call back, the number was unavailable.

  I’d been tormented for the next few days, partly upset that the careful, quiet life I’d begun to build, and even enjoy, had been upended by a single call, but also filled with a joyful, tentative hope that, perhaps if Jack was reaching out, he was ready for us to at least be friends again. I’d missed him so much. He dropped off the radar so completely after he left, and it had taken every ounce of strength I had to not go looking for him, to give him the space he needed, but when one month had stretched into two, became four, then six, I had no choice but to accept he wasn’t coming back.

  That was when I had my first panic attack.

  ‘So, you drove all the way down from Robin Hood’s Bay?’

  ‘What else was I going to do?’

  He reached over and stroked a lock of hair behind my ear, the gesture so tender the view in front of me rippled through fresh tears. ‘I love you so much, Caitlin,’ he said quietly. ‘When I was lying in hospital, waiting for you to arrive, all I could think about was your face, about how much I wanted us to be together and for us to have a family.’ Shock wrenched every muscle in my body, but he carried on, oblivious. ‘I think I might have been a bit of a dick about that in the past, but whatever’s happened, I want it more than anything. I want us to move on, to be happy, for this to be a new beginning. I don’t even care about the accident, about how it happened, or who it was, or where we live, or who said what. None of that matters.’

  I bit the inside of my lip so hard, I tasted blood. It was everything and more I’d longed to hear but assumed I never would. Not from Jack. But even as happiness flowed through my veins, softening my body, something occurred to me.

  Jack had said that, at the hospital, they asked him what year it was, and he answered correctly – yet he was recalling my birthday from the year before, as if he had forgotten everything since; why we’d split up, the fact we hadn’t set eyes on each other in all that time.

  Was there another reason Jack wanted to forget the past? Something he was happy to not remember, even if he didn’t yet know what it was?

  I’ve made a terrible mistake I can’t put right. All I can do is get out.

  As I mustered a tearful smile and pressed my cheek to his fingers, resting on my shoulder, a question slid into my head: What did you do, Jack?

  Maybe it was better that I didn’t know.

  Chapter 3

  Lydia

  Before

  I hovered outside the police station. Around me, rain bounced off the pavement, soaking my trousers. My umbrella didn’t offer much protection but at least it hid my face.

  I took a step closer to the building and stopped. If I went inside, if I reported Jack missing, questions would be asked. Questions I didn’t want to answer. I’d been in there a month ago, shaking all over, in front of an officer with understanding eyes. He’d spotted the bracelet of bruises around my wrist, the barely healed cut on my hand and gently asked for the name of the person responsible. He told me I should press charges. Apparently, they could arrest him without my permission if I gave a name and address.

  I broke down then and cried, wiping my nose on the back of my hand, the memory of Jack’s face rearing up in my mind: his mouth a thin, angr
y line, eyes glazed and unseeing in that moment. But most of the time, Jack did see me – he was the only one who truly did. He had done so much for me and Mattie. Mattie. My son’s face had replaced Jack’s. Sixteen years old, lost, and angry – at least, he had been before Jack came into our lives. Mattie loved him, even if he didn’t always show it. And now Jack was gone.

  For two days I had waited, knowing he needed time to calm down, certain he would return. He didn’t know anyone in London, other than his few gardening clients. I called a couple, but neither had seen or heard from him. Panic had sliced through me. I went looking for him, as though he might be pounding the streets, the words he’s gone, he’s gone, flying around my brain, keeping time with my feet as sweat broke out on my forehead. His friend Mac – the one he’d been staying with when we met – had relocated to Norway for work and Jack didn’t know anyone well enough to move in with.

  We’d been such a tight unit, Jack, Mattie, and me. Not perfect, not quite – the outbursts, when they came, reminded me how suddenly everything could collapse – but I’d believed we were strong enough to overcome any problems. I wanted us to, so badly. Jack was my soulmate. He’d told me I was his, that we must have been destined for each other. Silly romance-novel stuff that I’d long ago stopped believing in, but I had. Believed him. We were so happy, most of the time.

  It had occurred to me in the middle of a sleepless night that he might have gone back to Brighton, to her – his wife, Caitlin – and fear sank through me, cold and deep. They hadn’t got round to divorcing. It had only been just over a year, though he didn’t wear his wedding ring anymore, wasn’t wearing it the first time I saw him. I’d have run a mile if I’d known he was married.

  The glass doors of Acton police station slid open, spitting out two young women, one supporting the other who had a shredded tissue pressed to her mouth.

  ‘You going in?’ The friend, hard-eyed and sallow-faced, stopped so the doors stayed open, one arm tight around the other woman’s shoulders.

  If I went inside and reported Jack gone and they looked at their records, they might tell me it was for the best, that it was good he was out of my life. They might wonder why I was bothering to report him missing.

  ‘No … thank you.’ My voice was like a scratch in the rain-soaked air. A gust of wind caught my umbrella, turning it inside out. I shoved it in a nearby bin then hurried away, head down, cutting through Churchfield Road and back to the terraced house on Milton Road where Mattie had been born and raised, the house I’d been able to keep after William – Mattie’s dad – died, thanks to an insurance policy that paid off the mortgage with a bit left over. It was a nice house in a villagey part of Acton known as Poet’s Corner, a decent size – two bedrooms and a wide garden at the back – but it wasn’t a home without Jack, the first man in years I’d allowed into my life.

  A sob rose in my throat as I pushed open the hip-high wrought-iron gate that Mattie used to swing on when he was little, watching cars go up and down the road. The gate was rusted and squeaky by the time Jack moved in, but – like so much else – he’d fixed it, oiling the hinges and enlisting Mattie’s help to stroke black paint on the metal spokes while I watched from the window, wondering how we’d got so lucky and whether I could hold on to someone like Jack.

  I didn’t feel lucky now. The sight of myself in the rippled glass pane of the front door was a shock, my dark-blonde hair, which I’d scraped into a knot at the base of my neck, plastered to my scalp, my pale skin almost translucent in the gloomy light. I was thinner than I’d been when I met Jack nearly a year ago at the garden centre I worked at, where we’d got chatting. I was curvier then – too much comfort-eating and wine. Love had killed my appetite for a while, and I hadn’t regained the weight, but now my eyes were dark hollows from too many sleepless nights and endless cups of strong black tea.

  In the adjoining house a movement snagged my attention. Harriet Shipley. Pretending I hadn’t seen my neighbour’s piercing gaze through her bay window, I stuck my key in the lock with a shaking hand. My nails were bitten and ugly, a habit I couldn’t break.

  What had Harriet heard lately?

  A memory of a scream, torn from my throat a week ago, and Jack’s response, more roar than dialogue, brought a grimace to my face. Not easy to explain if Harriet asked. I’d been trying to avoid the old woman, even more than usual.

  The house was quiet when I entered, Mattie at school for another hour. At least, I hoped he was. He hadn’t skipped classes for ages; not since Jack came into our lives.

  A photo by the coat hooks of Mattie, aged seven, smiled shyly at me, his floppy dark hair cut shorter than he wore it now, a cleft in his chin like Jack’s. He could easily have passed for Jack’s son. Mattie’s real dad had been dark-haired too, but ordinary-looking – safe. A solicitor, twelve years older than me, nearly forty when Mattie was born, unaware of the heart condition that would kill him while he was out running one morning, two weeks after Mattie turned eleven. It’s your fault, Mum. Mattie had screamed at me on the morning of the funeral. You made him angry. That’s why he ran away. He’d started to lose his way after that, and so had I.

  I glanced in the mirror on the wall as I peeled off my sodden coat, blinking rain from my eyelashes, quickly turning away from the sight of myself – the self that Jack had chosen to leave. He doesn’t want you anymore. A shudder passed through me that had nothing to do with being cold, fear like a fist in my stomach.

  What was I going to do? What if he was dead, like William? Mattie would never forgive me. I ran into the kitchen and retched over the sink. Nothing came up but bile. I was empty inside. A mug of half-drunk tea sat by the sink. I’d barely been able to force breakfast down, had struggled with food since Jack stormed out. It was hard to imagine ever wanting to eat a meal again.

  Do something. The voice rang loud in my head, drowning out everything else. It sounded a lot like my father. He wouldn’t have sat around, waiting. Even now, nearly twenty years on, the grief was like a hand squeezing my heart. I missed him so much. Too much loss, the therapist had said, after Mattie’s dad died, can lead to unhealthy ways of coping. But I had coped, in my own way. I’d met Jack, let myself fall for him. Do something. I couldn’t sit around, wondering, waiting for news.

  Jack couldn’t have disappeared into thin air when he had taken hardly anything with him. His clothes still hung in the wardrobe upstairs, his passport was there with his driver’s licence, and so was the book he’d been reading – a tome about horticulture, lying by the armchair in the living room. He’d even left his favourite leather jacket, hanging by Mattie’s faded old parka in the hall. He wasn’t dead; I felt it in my bones.

  I’d searched for a note the first night after he left, the quiet click of the front door worse somehow than if he’d slammed out, feeling under my pillow where he knew I would find it, but not right away, but there wasn’t one. Relief had sloshed through me at first, until I realised not knowing where he’d gone, whether it was permanent, was worse.

  He wouldn’t kill himself, I was sure of that. He loved me, loved Mattie, despite everything. We were supposed to be together, but what could I do if I had no idea where he’d gone? I wanted a chance to try harder to be what he wanted, for Mattie’s sake as much as my own. I told myself he’d come back once he’d calmed down. But in my gut, I think I knew even then he’d left for good. He had chosen to go.

  But if he was dead? He wasn’t. I would have heard by now. Not if he had no ID. I suspected he must have discarded his phone after trying his number multiple times and hearing it was ‘no longer in service’. A number I’d called from Mattie’s phone at first, and then a cheap model I’d run out to buy from Carphone Warehouse after searching the house in a panic and realising mine was missing. Had Jack taken it? I couldn’t think of any other reason it wouldn’t be in the house, or my bag.

  The front door opened, letting in the sound of a road-sweeping lorry chuntering past, and I realised I’d been standing by the kitchen s
ink, staring blankly through the rain-spattered window, a tea towel gripped in my hand that I couldn’t recall picking up.

  ‘Mum?’ Mattie’s voice was edged with the sullenness I’d hoped was gone for good after Jack had become part of our little family. ‘What are you doing?’

  Turning slowly, a throb of pain in my palm a reminder of what had gone before, I took in the sight of my son in the kitchen doorway, transformed from the short, gangly boy he’d been into a tall, broad-shouldered sixteen-year-old, his rucksack dangling off his shoulder. Something like fear shrouded the wide puppy-brown eyes that used to look at me with love, back when I was the centre of his world – though even then, he’d been a daddy’s boy, face brightening whenever William came home from work. He needed a male role model. He needed Jack. We both did.

  ‘He’s not coming back, Mum.’ Mattie’s words switched pitch halfway through. His voice was finally breaking, later than most of his friends’ – a reminder he was no longer my little boy. A boy who had seen too much, despite my best efforts.

  ‘He will,’ I whispered, but I wasn’t sure Mattie heard me, or that the words had even left my lips. He was backing away, a sheen of tears in his eyes.

  ‘I know what was going on,’ he burst out when he reached the stairs that would take him up to his room, where he would lock himself away. ‘I’m glad he’s gone.’

  ‘You don’t mean that, Mattie.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’ His lip curled, expression hardening. I noticed the beginnings of a moustache along his soft upper lip, and pale wisps of hair around his jaw that made my heart feel as if it was breaking.

  ‘Mattie—’

  Instead of going upstairs, he was heading back to the door that was still standing open, a slice of metal-grey sky visible through the gap. ‘I’m going to Callum’s.’

  ‘What about dinner?’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  The door slammed and he’d gone, leaving behind his musky scent, mingled with earth and rain.