Chapter 26
26
DEE
A text pinged in. Dee grabbed her phone expecting it to be an update from Babs but to her surprise it was Yvonne, the wife of Nigel’s friend, Andrew, who she presumed was on the golf trip with Nigel.
I need to talk to you urgently. Call me when you’re free.
Dee read the text, puzzled. She and Yvonne were polite to each other, but not chummy. Yvonne had never messaged her wanting to talk before. Had something happened on the trip? Was Nigel hurt? Had Andrew asked Yvonne to contact Dee to let her know?
She quickly hit the call button. ‘Yvonne, what’s happened? Is Nigel okay?’
‘Don’t panic. It’s nothing like that. Although you might want to do him some damage when you learn what he’s done.’
Dee swallowed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Look, I’m really sorry to break this to you but I simply can’t not tell you. It wouldn’t be fair.’ She paused. ‘Nigel and Andrew, they’ve been playing away. They’ve been cheating on us, Deirdre.’ On the few occasions that Dee had met Yvonne she’d always insisted on calling her by her full name of Deirdre.
Dee closed her eyes. Not again. She’d thought that was all over with. Nigel had sworn after the last time that he’d never cheat again. It had been five years, and there had been no signs. He was older now. She thought, hoped, he was past all that. Maybe he’d simply got better at hiding it.
‘Are you sure? How do you know?’ she asked.
‘My friend, Katya, you’ve met her a couple of times, is in Portugal on holiday, in the same resort, and she saw Nigel and Andrew arm in arm with some women. She sent me photos. Do you want to see them?’
There could be nothing in it. They could just be friends, Dee thought. Like she was friends with Kenny. If someone took a photo of her talking to Kenny, that might look a bit suspicious, mightn’t it?
‘Yes, send them over. There could be an innocent explanation.’ She desperately hoped that there was.
‘I’ll call you back when I’ve sent them,’ Yvonne told her.
A few seconds later her phone pinged. She opened up the message. There were two photos and a short video. She opened the photos first. The first photo showed Nigel walking along the street holding hands with an attractive woman. Dee couldn’t remember the last time Nigel had held hands with her. She pressed her fingers on the screen to enlarge the photo, the woman looked to be in her mid-fifties and their hands were clasped close together, fingers entwined. The next photo showed them sitting opposite each other, drinking a beer. Nigel was holding the woman’s hand across the table and they were gazing into each other’s eyes. She braced herself and played the video. Nigel and the woman embracing, kissing. Like he hadn’t kissed Dee for a long time. And definitely not the way you kissed a friend.
The phone rang. It was Yvonne. ‘The ones with Andrew are similar. I think there’s no doubt that they’re cheating on us. I’m booking a flight out to Portugal tonight and I’m confronting Andrew before he leaves. Let him wiggle his way out of this one. Want to come with me?’
Dee couldn’t think of anything worse than flying over to Portugal in order to see Nigel with another woman. ‘No, I don’t. I’ll talk to Nigel when he comes back.’
‘He’ll worm his way out of it, men always do. If we confront them, then they won’t have chance to come up with a story.’
‘Yvonne, the way I feel right now if Nigel wants to go off with another woman, she’s welcome to him.’
‘Do you want me to give him a message from you?’ Yvonne asked.
‘No. I’ll deal with it when he comes back home. Thanks for telling me though, and good luck.’
* * *
Andi put a steaming mug in front of her. ‘Want to talk or be left alone?’
Dee closed her eyes briefly. ‘Just give me a few moments.’
She couldn’t believe that she’d said that to Yvonne. And she’d meant it too. She was tired of worrying about what Nigel was up to. She’d had years of it. She’d put up with it so that she didn’t disrupt the children’s lives, she didn’t want them to suffer, and because somehow Nigel had made it seem like it was her fault. That she never had enough time for him so he’d been forced to seek attention elsewhere.
Well now the children were grown up, she only had to bother about herself. And she didn’t want to put up with it any more. Nigel could do what he wanted. All she wanted was to stay down here in Port Telwyn.
She definitely wasn’t ready to go back and confront Nigel yet. Maybe she never would be. Yvonne would tell him that she’d made Dee aware of what he’d been up to. Let him make the first move. She’d rather stay down here for a while, get her head straight, decide what to do. She’d go to the estate agents tomorrow and see if they had another cottage she could rent for a while, give her time to think. Right now she didn’t ever want to go home.