Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
I’m up before the alarm.
That’s the first sign something is wrong, because I never beat the alarm.
I’m the woman who hits snooze three times, drags herself to the bathroom with her eyes half shut, and stands under the shower until the hot water runs out.
Alex is the early riser. Alex is the one who gets up at six-fifteen, makes coffee, checks his emails, and has the kitchen in order before I even come downstairs.
But today I’m standing at the hob at quarter to six, cracking eggs into a pan with hands that won’t hold still.
The kitchen smells of butter and toast, and the coffee machine is already gurgling.
I’ve laid the table properly – place mats, glasses of juice, a pot of jam instead of the jar – as if a nice breakfast can undo what I did last night.
It can’t. But I’m going to try anyway.
I slept badly. Two, maybe three hours in total, lying on my side with my back to Alex, my eyes open in the dark, replaying the kiss frame by frame until the memory wore grooves into my skull.
His hand on my jaw. His mouth against mine.
The way my entire body leaned into it for those few seconds before the guilt hit, and the way I pulled away so hard I almost fell.
I can still feel it now, standing in my own kitchen in my pyjamas and socks, frying eggs for my husband.
A tingling ghost of it, sitting on my lips like something I can’t wash off.
I scrub my mouth with the back of my hand. It doesn’t help.
Olivia appears in the doorway in her school uniform, hair scraped into a ponytail that’s already coming loose, blazer slung over one arm, bag trailing from the other. She stops when she sees the table.
‘What’s all this?’
‘Breakfast,’ I say, as if it’s obvious.
‘We never have proper breakfast.’
‘We do sometimes.’
‘We don’t. We have toast, and you shout at me to hurry up.’ She drops her bag by the door and slides into her chair, eyeing the eggs, the juice, and the place mats with open suspicion. ‘Are you feeling guilty about something?’
My stomach lurches.
‘Don’t be daft,’ I say, and it comes out bright and tight, like a string pulled too far. ‘I just thought it would be nice. Sit down and eat before it goes cold.’
‘I am sitting down.’
‘Then eat.’
She picks up her fork, still watching me, and I turn back to the hob so she can’t see my face.
Thirteen-year-olds notice everything. They’re like tiny detectives with bad attitudes and no filter, and Olivia is sharper than most. She knows when I’ve been crying.
She knows when Alex and I have had an argument.
She once asked me, aged eleven, why I always went quiet after Grandma phoned, and I had to pretend I didn’t know what she was talking about.
She knows me. That’s the problem. She knows me, and I’m standing here trying to cover a lie with eggs.
Alex comes in a few minutes later, dressed for work – shirt tucked in, tie loosened, sleeves not yet rolled up. He pauses in the doorway the same way Olivia did, his gaze moving from the table to me and back again.
‘What’s the occasion?’
‘No occasion. Just breakfast.’
‘You’ve done eggs.’
‘Is that a crime?’
‘It’s unusual.’ He crosses to the coffee machine and pours himself a cup.
I can feel him watching me as I plate up his eggs and set them down at his place.
‘How was the work thing last night?’ he asks.
The question is casual. Light. He asks it the same way he’d ask about the weather or if I’d remembered to put petrol in the car, and that’s what makes it so awful, because the answer should be equally casual and instead it takes every gram of control I have to keep my voice level.
‘It was fine,’ I say. ‘The usual. Drinks, small talk, someone from marketing going on about print costs. You know how it is.’
‘You were back late.’
‘It ran over. I texted you.’
‘I know. I just mean you’re usually home before ten.’
‘Well, I wasn’t. Are you going to eat your eggs or interrogate me?’
He holds up one hand in surrender, sits, and starts eating. Olivia glances between us and says nothing, her eyes studying the situation and committing it to memory. One more odd moment to add to whatever quiet tally she keeps in her head about the state of her parents’ marriage.
I sit down with my own plate and pick up my fork. The eggs taste of nothing. I eat them anyway.
‘Olivia, have you got everything for today?’ Alex asks, shifting the conversation. ‘What about that PE kit – did you wash it?’
‘Mum washed it.’
‘Did I?’ I say, and then I remember. I did. Last Thursday. It’s in the airing cupboard. ‘Yes. Yes, I did. It’s upstairs.’
‘Are you all right?’ Alex says, looking at me.
‘I’m fine.’
‘You seem distracted.’
‘I’m not distracted. I’m tired. I was out late and I got up early to make breakfast, and now nobody seems to want it, so forgive me if I’m not firing on all cylinders.’
He lets it go. He reaches across the table for the jam and spreads it on his toast, and Olivia asks him something about a school trip consent form she needs signed.
Alex says he’ll do it tonight, and the conversation moves on to packed lunches and hockey fixtures and whether Olivia’s friend Mia is allowed to come for tea on Friday.
The kitchen fills up with the sounds of family life – cutlery, chewing, half-finished sentences, the hum of the fridge – and from the outside, we must look fine.
Better than fine. We must look like one of those families in a Sunday supplement – the nice house, the good school, the home-made breakfast with juice in actual glasses.
A mother who cares enough to set the table.
A father who asks the right questions. A daughter who is healthy and bright and hasn’t yet worked out that her parents are only pretending.
The thought makes me want to cry.
I clear the plates while Olivia goes upstairs to find her PE kit, and Alex stands by the sink finishing his coffee. He’s close enough that I can smell his aftershave, and something that might be love and might be grief stabs me, but I can’t tell the difference this morning.
‘Kim,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘Is something wrong?’
I rinse a plate under the tap and put it in the rack. ‘No. Why would there be?’
‘You’re being very… attentive.’
‘Is that a complaint?’
‘It’s an observation.’
‘Well, stop observing and drink your coffee. You’ll be late.’
He watches me for a moment longer, and the pressure of his attention, his concern, the way he tries to read me when he thinks something is off, weighs me down.
Alex isn’t stupid. He’s a solicitor. He notices contradictions and inconsistencies and things that don’t add up, and a wife who is suddenly making eggs at seven in the morning after claiming to have been at a work party until half ten is a contradiction he hasn’t missed.
But he doesn’t push. That’s Alex. He’ll notice, and he’ll wait, because pushing isn’t his way. He gives people enough rope and sees what they do with it.
I’m currently wrapping mine into a noose.
‘Right,’ he says, putting his mug in the sink. ‘I’ve got a meeting at nine. I’ll be back by six, maybe half past. Shall we do something this weekend? Take Olivia out somewhere?’
‘Like where?’
‘I don’t know. Lunch? A walk? That place in Bath she likes, with the milkshakes?’
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘That sounds nice.’
‘Good.’
He leans over and kisses me on the side of my head.
His lips land on my hair and stay there for half a second.
Then he’s gone, picking up his briefcase from the hall, calling goodbye to Olivia, opening the front door, and I’m left standing at the sink with hot water running over my fingers and the ghost of his mouth on my hair and the memory of a different mouth on my lips.
The two sensations overlap and blur, and I grip the edge of the worktop and close my eyes.
I kissed Ross Mercer last night.
No – Ross kissed me. There’s a difference. He leaned in and I didn’t stop him, and for three or four seconds I kissed him back. Then I pulled away, drove home, climbed into bed next to my husband, and stared at the wall until dawn.
But I kissed him back. That’s the part I can’t get around. In those seconds, I felt relief, and want, and the terrifying sensation of being known by someone who used to know me better than anyone.
I wanted it. I can tell myself I didn’t, I can rewrite the scene in my head with me pulling away sooner, pushing him off, saying no before his mouth reached mine. But that isn’t what happened.
I wanted it, and part of me still does, and that is the thing I cannot say out loud in this kitchen or any other room in this house.
Olivia thunders back downstairs with her PE bag and her coat and stands in the hallway shouting that she’s going to be late. I wipe my hands, check that my face looks normal, and drive her to school in silence except for the radio, which plays something forgettable that we both ignore.
She gets out at the gates, slings her bag over her shoulder, and says, ‘Thanks, Mum,’ without looking back.
I watch her disappear through the entrance, and my throat aches with love so fierce it feels dangerous.
The house is quiet when I get home. The breakfast things are half cleared, the coffee machine still warm, Alex’s mug sitting in the sink with a ring of brown at the bottom. I finish tidying, load the dishwasher, wipe the surfaces, and then I sit at the kitchen table with my laptop and try to work.
I can’t work.
I stare at a half-finished cover layout for twenty minutes, and all I can see is Ross’s face under the street light, his hand reaching for my jaw, the expression in his eyes when I pulled away – not anger, not frustration, just concern, and something underneath it that looked an awful lot like sadness.
My phone buzzes.
I pick it up. It’s a Facebook notification – a message, not a post, the little red circle sitting in the corner of the app like a warning light. I open it, and my chest tightens.
Ross Mercer.
We need to talk. It was more than just a kiss.
I stare at the screen. Eleven words. Eleven small, ordinary words that could blow my life apart if they were seen by the wrong person, and he’s sent them on Facebook, where Alex could find them if he ever thought to look, which he won’t, because Alex trusts me.
The guilt hits so hard I feel it in my teeth.
I lock the phone and push it away from me, towards the fruit bowl, as if distance will make the message disappear. I open my laptop again, stare at the cover layout and move the text box forward and back.
I don’t reply.
I won’t reply. Last night was the end of it – a moment of madness, a detour, a wrong turning that I’ve already corrected by walking away.
I’m not the woman who does this, who lies to her husband and meets old boyfriends in restaurants and kisses them on dark streets and then sits at her kitchen table the next morning pretending everything is fine.
Except I am. Because I did.
The phone sits face down on the table, and the message sits inside it, and I can feel it there like a splinter under my skin – small, sharp, impossible to ignore.
I don’t reply.
But I don’t delete it either.