Chapter 1 #2
Rowan had spent a fortune on the type of lingerie that an online forum had informed her was guaranteed to ‘reignite the passion’.
When James had emerged from the bathroom after his shower, she’d been lying on the bed, in a position a contortionist would have been proud of, in an attempt to flaunt her best bits, and disguise the parts of her body she hated the most, which these days seemed to be the majority of it.
When the person who was supposed to love you most didn’t seem to find you remotely attractive, it was hard to hold on to any shred of self-esteem.
James’s eyes had widened in what she’d hoped was surprise, but which she had a feeling now had been far closer to horror.
He’d mumbled something about having an upset stomach and had bolted straight back into the bathroom, where he’d remained for the next twenty minutes.
By the time he’d re-emerged, Rowan had got dressed and downed half a bottle of champagne to drown her sorrows in the wake of James’s reaction to her attempt at seducing him.
He’d been all smiles when he’d finally come back out of the bathroom, reminding Rowan that they had plans for dinner in thirty minutes.
‘I thought you had a bad stomach.’ Even the words had tasted bitter in her mouth and she’d taken another huge slug of champagne to try and wash them away.
‘I think it was just a bit of cramp, but I feel fine now.’ He’d smiled again and she’d felt like slapping the expression off his face; the mixture of humiliation and anger were a dangerous combination.
‘Funny that. The sight of me without my clothes on always seems to make you feel ill just lately.’
‘Rowan, please.’
‘What? Not this again? Is that what you’re going to say?
’ She took another glug of champagne. ‘Don’t worry, I don’t want to have the same conversation we’ve had a hundred times before again either.
It always goes the same way anyway. I ask you what’s wrong and tell you how unattractive it makes me feel, and you come up with half a dozen excuses to avoid admitting that anything’s wrong. Except we both know it is.’
‘Having young kids and busy jobs is tough on us both. Every relationship goes through changes and dry spells. I’m sure things will shift again in the future.
’ He’d reached out then and put a hand on her shoulder, but she’d shaken him off and refilled her glass.
She’d wanted to tell him that he was wrong, that more than eighteen months without any physical intimacy didn’t represent the kind of dry spell that everyone went through, it was the goddamn Sahara Desert.
Rowan had never been confident and had often felt like she came last on the list with her parents.
Her father had been a workaholic and her mother had seemed to feel hemmed in when she was at home, always finding somewhere else to go or something else to do instead.
Rowan had never felt at ease with her appearance, either.
At five feet nine she’d been taller than most of the boys growing up and had felt awkward and clumsy.
She’d had hair that had been almost the exact same shade as Ginger Nut biscuits, which was the nickname that had stuck all the way through school.
She might have eventually grown into the limbs that had once felt far too long, and started receiving compliments about how beautiful her hair was and how her height meant she could have been a model, but inside she still felt like the gawky kid with red hair.
When she hit her teens she’d had a good group of friends, but she was still quite shy outside of that circle and preferred going unnoticed to attracting the kind of comments that might make her face flush red and clash with her hair.
Then something had changed, maybe because she’d begun to excel at school and her confidence no longer seemed to pivot on whether or not someone called her Ginger Nut.
Just when she’d begun to feel comfortable in her own skin, her parents’ marriage had ended in a way that had made them the talk of Port Agnes and all she’d wanted to do was hide again.
Everything that had happened had robbed Rowan of the confidence she’d finally begun to build up and when she and her mother had started over somewhere new, she’d gone back to being the girl standing in the corner, desperately hoping to blend into the background.
Except then she’d met James, and he hadn’t seemed to notice how awkward she felt.
They’d been friends at first, and maybe that’s why she’d never been tongue-tied or embarrassed around him.
Instead she’d been completely herself, the way most teenagers never truly are, and he’d liked her anyway.
Over the years her confidence had grown, not just because of James, but because she was proud of what she’d achieved in her career and her personal life.
Until things had started to change again, as they always seemed to do, and it hadn’t taken much for that fragile confidence to unravel.
James’s unwillingness to touch her fed straight into the self-loathing she’d fought so hard to conquer.
She was ugly, she must be, and the fact that her husband would rather fake a stomach ache than have sex with her proved it.
Rowan hadn’t said any of those things to James.
Instead she’d drunk more of the champagne and gone out to dinner with him as planned.
They’d stuck to safe ground and talked about the children, and she’d tried not to think too much about whether there was someone else he’d rather be with; someone he wanted to touch in the way he never wanted to touch her any more.
He’d never been particularly passionate, but his disinterest had grown since the birth of their second child and had tailed off altogether around the time that Izzy Hennessy, the new religious education teacher, had joined the school.
Izzy worked closely with James, and Rowan had seen them together, looking far more like a touchy-feely couple than he had with his own wife.
They always looked as though they were laughing at some private joke and more and more lately she wondered if she might be the butt of that joke.
She didn’t want to believe it of James. They’d been a couple since they were nineteen and he was the school chaplain, a man so devoted to his beliefs that he went on regular retreats to connect with his faith on a deeper level, and who volunteered with several Christian charities.
His father was a retired bishop and there was no way he’d have an affair. She was sure of it. Almost.
Except now, sitting here and listening to her two friends talk about their husbands, she knew something was wrong.
They were all around the same age, they all had children and marriages of a similar length.
James’s job was arguably the least physically demanding of any of them, yet for well over a year he’d allegedly been too exhausted to sleep with his wife.
During that same period he’d started undertaking weekly ‘faith walks’ with Izzy.
She should confront him and ask outright if there was something going on between him and Izzy, but somehow it felt far easier to bury herself in work.
Although she was about to discover that she wasn’t hiding her worries nearly as well as she’d thought.
‘All joking aside, Row, you’ve been really quiet lately. Are you okay?’ Pippa narrowed her eyes, seeming to answer her own question before Rowan even tried. ‘You’re not, are you? What’s up? Is it just the job or…?’
Pippa’s eyes hadn’t left her face and Rowan wished her friend would look away; it would be far easier to lie to her if she did. Then she could pretend the job was the only thing bothering her, but Pippa still hadn’t broken eye contact.
‘Work is busy.’
‘It’s not just that though, is it?’ The eye contact was too intense and Rowan found herself blurting out the words she’d never intended to say.
‘I think James might be having an affair.’ She looked from Pippa to Odette, trying to read their expressions, now that the unthinkable suggestion was out there.
Membory Grange could be a hotbed of gossip and if there really was something going on between her husband and Izzy, there was a good chance one of them had heard a rumour.
Although if Odette knew, she’d clearly missed her vocation as an actress, because her eyebrows had shot up in surprise and disappeared behind her fringe, her mouth forming a silent O. And Pippa had furrowed her brow.
‘I can’t see it. James?’ She made it sound ridiculously far-fetched. As if Rowan had suggested that her husband was secretly working for MI5.
‘Me neither.’ Odette sat down next to her. ‘He always seems devoted to the job and the kids, and…’
‘You can’t finish that sentence, can you?’ Rowan looked at her friend. That should have been the moment when Odette had said ‘and to you’, but she hadn’t been able to do it, because it was obvious even from the outside that James wasn’t devoted to Rowan.
‘Well, I mean, you’re the headteacher and he’s the chaplain, so I wouldn’t expect to see you walking around the school holding hands.’ Odette gave her a weak smile.
‘No, but you, me and Pippa socialise together, with our husbands, and I’ve seen the way Seb looks at you, and how Daniel is with Pippa. It’s starting to feel as if James and I are more like friends than husband and wife, and if he moved any further over to his side of the bed he’d be on the floor.’
‘It can be easy to drift into complacency in a long-term relationship.’ Pippa’s tone was soothing.
‘But I’m sure James wouldn’t do anything to risk your marriage.
Have there been any other signs to make you suspicious?
There’s supposed to be a whole list of dead giveaways if someone is having an affair. ’