Chapter 6
SIX
ANNA
It was still almost completely dark when my alarm went off the next morning.
Gray and I hadn’t got around to closing the blinds in our bedroom, and through the window I could see the dark branches of the plane trees that bordered the square silhouetted like skeletal fingers against an almost-as-dark sky.
It was raining too – I could hear the occasional dash of drops on the windowpane and the swish of car tyres on the wet tarmac.
Pulling the duvet up to my chin, I turned over in bed, the movement making me realise that my head was banging and I felt sick.
Gray was lying next to me, his pyjamaed back motionless.
I didn’t reach out to touch him; I just looked at his solid, familiar form on the right-hand side of our bed, where it had been almost every morning for twenty years.
Abruptly, the details of the previous night came rushing back.
As soon as Gray had said her name – Laurel’s name – I’d stood up, fetched a clean glass and splashed some red wine into it from the bottle I had opened earlier.
Now, I found I couldn’t remember the details of what he’d told me – the wine and the gin I’d drunk earlier had seen to that.
But the gist was there. My husband was sick. He was sick, and he was in love with another woman.
I remembered Lulu coming home from her night out, responsibly letting herself into the house at exactly five to ten.
I remembered hearing her clumpy trainers step across the hallway then stop, and I imagined her standing at the top of the stairs, seeing the lights on down in the kitchen, hesitating while she decided whether to come and tell us she was home or go straight up to her bedroom and start texting the friends she’d said goodbye to ten minutes before.
Don’t, Lulu, I thought, watching as Gray too turned towards the stairs, his face expectant and wary. Don’t come down and see us like this, the candles extinguished, the Marks Barney’s friend’s mum would be dropping him off at some point during the morning.
I had the next few hours to myself, and I was going to use them.
I was going to get out my laptop, make some strong coffee and do some research.
I was going to find out what was what. Because there was no way I was going to allow this to happen. Gray was going to get better. He was going to see his children grow up and graduate and get married and have kids of their own. And he was going to stay married to me.
Laurel was just going to have to suck it up.