Erin
Jason – or, at least, the champagne he’d consumed in advance of this conversation – said it was a good idea.
‘And I was thinking,’ Jason said, ‘I might get an apartment. Rent one, I mean. Just for twelve months. Not right in the city centre – you’d pay through the nose for that, and there’s no real need – but closer to it than here.
It would just be handy, to have a place to crash if there’s an event or a dinner or whatever.
And then, if there’s a gap between us selling this place and getting the keys to the new house, we won’t have to stress. We’ll have somewhere to stay.’
Better than.
So she’d murmured, ‘Yeah, good idea.’
Within days, he’d found a one-bed in a complex in Cherrywood.
The unit came fully furnished, but there was still so much to get.
Erin offered to sort it out for him while he was in Limerick visiting the site of a new Shreddr location.
The shopping was fun. She got him everything he might need and more than he might want – that they might want when, potentially, they were living there, together, waiting to move into their new home.
A fancy coffee machine. Lamps to soften the lighting. Expensive linen sheets.
And it was just as well.
Within three days of putting their house up for sale, they had a cash buyer offering ten grand above asking.
The house was a reminder of less happy times, anchoring them to their past when they were preparing to soar into their future.
They were both glad to see the back of it. They accepted the offer.
But the swiftness of the sale put a spanner in the works.
Jason wanted to wait to start house-hunting; summer was the time to go looking, he said.
That was when they’d have the most choice.
And he didn’t really have time to do it now, seeing as he was spending almost every weekend in Limerick, opening a new location and running into all sorts of issues with the planning, fit-out, insurance.
Every week, it seemed, there was a new headache.
Erin suggested that she search and bring a shortlist to Jason, but he said things would calm down soon and then he’d be able to give it his full attention.
Besides, he wanted them to find their forever home together.
In April, Erin moved into the apartment in Cherrywood with a couple of suitcases and not much else to do but wait.
Three stiff, smooth, dusty-pink bags with velvet-ribbon handles and CURATED printed in gold on both sides, stashed in the bottom of his wardrobe, almost hidden by the lower rail of hanging jeans and trousers.
They were obviously gifts, and if she had found them before Christmas or closer to her birthday, Erin would have presumed they were for her and left them in situ.
But there was no occasion approaching, no reason for these items to be there.
And Jason was not usually this thoughtful, or organized; she’d received more than her fair share of boxed chocolates and service-station flowers in her time.
So, curious, she pulled them all out and set them on the bed.
One of them had a framed something in it, neatly wrapped; she had no way of knowing what was inside.
The biggest bag contained a bundle of odd-looking brushes, wrapped to look like a bouquet.
The third held a small hamper of scented things where it was obvious at least one item was missing; what might have been a candle had left an impression in the packing straw.
She looked at the labels on what remained and saw they were all the same brand and all the same scent, and that was a match for the only item she had ever seen Jason bring into this apartment besides takeaway food: the candle on the coffee table in the living room.
She remembered noticing it, thinking it was strange.
Asking herself why would Jason bring home a candle – and, at some point, light it?
At the time, she’d thought he’d got it free somewhere, a gift bag at a corporate event or something, and that he’d lit it to cover a smell.
Burnt popcorn, perhaps, since the man loved to make it but as yet hadn’t grasped that you had to listen for the popping to slow.
He’d burned so many bags of it back in the house in Kildare – and the smell of it was so bad and lingered for so long – that she’d had to ban them.
She could’ve called and asked him where they’d come from, what or who they were for, then and there.
But she just had the strangest feeling that she had stumbled upon something she wasn’t supposed to see.
It was the fact that they were hidden, stashed away, and there were three of them – and they’d been there for months.
There were receipts in two of the bags showing they’d been purchased back in January.
Jason was at work and, without a job to go to or any friends to see, Erin didn’t have anything to do but stew.
When she went to bed that evening she was still telling herself not to overreact, but all night she lay awake, convincing herself that something was happening, that these bags were gifts for a woman that wasn’t her.
She added it to the feeling she’d had the night at Thomas’s new apartment, that she was on the outside, nowhere near the centre of her own husband’s life.
The change in him, soon after. Happier. It was like he’d gone out one night and come back, if not quite a different person, then a different version of himself.
The condoms she’d found in a drawer the day she’d moved in here, which Jason said belonged to their chief financial officer who’d stayed in the apartment for a few nights while a burst pipe at his home was being repaired.
How, whenever Jason was in Limerick, he never ever answered his phone. Twice, she’d called someone she knew from Shreddr who would be with him, and twice she’d heard the exact same line. I’ll get him to call you. But from two different people. As if they’d been fed it, prepped.
And, at the moment, he was in Limerick every single weekend.
She searched online for the store and, the next morning, sick with a gnawing dread and from a lack of any restorative sleep, she decided to go there. She didn’t know what for, exactly, but she had no other ideas.
Behind the counter was a woman just like her, only better. The kind of woman Erin, without Jason, could’ve been.
The store seemed to be this woman’s own business. As they interacted, Erin searched her face for clues that she was talking to her husband’s mistress, or that this woman feared she was talking to her lover’s wife.
There weren’t any. She started to think she was being paranoid. Until, as she went to pay, she saw the same candle on the counter.
‘It’s nice, isn’t it? My boyfriend is obsessed with it.’
Boyfriend.
Erin felt a bolt of stone-cold certainty: boyfriend equalled Jason.
And then, anger. Because this woman was Erin’s age.
But she had got to it having avoided him.
She had never met the Jason who would’ve told her lies, knocked her down, steered her off course.
That’s how she had got here, to her own business, to success, to not looking like all the life had already drained out of her.
Meanwhile, Erin had suffered. Sacrificed. Endured. Her time and her support and her money had facilitated Jason’s transformation into Jason 2.0, the attractive, successful businessman.
Who could be with this woman whose life he hadn’t got to ruin, a woman who would never know that Jason was a life-ruiner.
For hours Erin paced the apartment and practised what she was going to say to him in her head.
She was going to be calm and cool, measured.
She wasn’t going to get emotional; this was going to be an adult conversation.
As per usual, he was late, which gave her time to find more things to add to the pot of betrayal.
How rarely he was home. How seeing Monica with Thomas might have given him the idea he could upgrade to a woman like her.
The fact that he was dragging his feet on the new house.
By the time he finally arrived, Erin was ready to explode – so she did, screaming accusations at him before he’d even had a chance to close the door behind him.
Jason listened without saying a word in that deeply infuriating way of his, which only made her scream more, louder, and then he gave her that look she’d seen so many times, including on their wedding day, which meant she was being wrong, if not downright stupid, and he was salivating at the chance to tell her so.
He waited for her to burn herself out, then said, calmly, ‘Are you finished?’
Dumbly, she nodded.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘So let me get this straight. You found some stuff in my wardrobe. And now, because a woman who works in the shop that stuff came from mentioned to you that her boyfriend likes the same candle that you say is on my coffee table, you think she and I are having an affair?’
‘It is on your coffee table! Look!’
She picked up what remained of the candle and threw it at him.
He caught it in both hands and looked at it, frowning. ‘I honestly don’t even remember where this came from. But there was a bit of a smell when I first moved in. Probably because they’d only just finished painting the place. Maybe I burned it then.’
‘But where did it come from, Jason? Where did you get the bags? And why did you hide them?’
‘I don’t even know. I don’t remember. And the reason I don’t remember is because it wasn’t important.
Maybe Monica gave them to me? She’s always getting gifts and stuff from clients.
Usually it’s alcohol, but maybe she …’ He nodded.
‘Actually, yeah. I think she gave me that stuff because she knew I was moving in here. That rings a bell now. Isn’t it all, like, home stuff? ’
Reluctantly, she nodded to confirm that it was. ‘Yes, but—’
‘We’re buying a house together,’ he said then. ‘Why would I be planning on leaving you?’
It felt like a swift punch, straight to the solar plexus, or a blade between the ribs, all the way in until it started coming out again.
Because Erin had never said anything about him leaving her. That hadn’t even crossed her mind.
She thought he was cheating on her.
‘You’re never here,’ she said listlessly.
‘Because I’m working. For us. So we can afford that house.’
‘But you won’t even start looking for it.’
‘Because I’m working!’ he shouted, throwing up his hands.
‘God, something always has to be wrong with you, doesn’t it?
You’re never happy. Sometimes, I don’t think you even want to be.
Here we are, finally, everything going right.
Everything happening for us. And you’re going off the deep end because you found a candle.
Maybe you should go back to work, Erin. You clearly have too much time on your hands.
’ He hesitated. ‘And maybe you should talk to someone. A doctor, or … I don’t know.
Someone. Professional. There has to be a reason for this.
It’s like … It’s like you want to ruin this.
Us. Why? Don’t you love me any more? Is that it?
Are you trying to get out of this but you’re too scared to do it yourself? ’
Jason looked wounded now, on the verge of tears.
She felt like everything solid was running away from her.
Because … wasn’t he right? She had overreacted, hadn’t she?
‘Jason—’ she started.
‘Erin, listen to me. Nothing is wrong. We’re doing good. You can let yourself believe it.’ He came to her, took her hands in his. Squeezed them. ‘We’ve done it. We’ve made it. I love you.’