Chapter Forty-Seven
LUKE
Six Weeks Before the Anniversary Party
‘I did it,’ he tells her. ‘I met up with Jess’s mum.’
Elena twists in her high-backed blue armchair to look at him. ‘How did it go?’
‘Well, I think. She looks a decade younger the last time I saw her. It was almost like meeting a completely different woman. Not just from the way she behaved and looked, but also the words coming out of her mouth. She’s been sober for four years now and is married again, happy.
I don’t think Jess and I ever believed this was going to happen, but it has. ’
‘That’s amazing! And what does Jess think?’
He has the decency to look uncomfortable.
It’s not that he and Jess have been arguing, far from it.
But it feels as if there’s a wall of thick Perspex between them, and everything is just bouncing off of it.
‘I haven’t told her yet,’ he admits slowly.
‘I’ve been trying to find the right way to bring it up. ’
She gives him a look that says, coward, but doesn’t press the matter. ‘Do you have any plans of when or where or how you might want to suggest a meeting between her and Jess?’
He takes a sip of his coffee. The woman who served him at the coffee outlet near downstairs forgot to give him one of those cardboard sleeves and it’s burning his fingers.
‘I’m not sure I know where to start. But I wondered about our anniversary party next month.
It would be neutral ground and there will be lots of other people there.
If Jess didn’t want to say anything more than “Hi, nice to see you,” she wouldn’t have to.
If she wants to have a more in-depth conversation with her mum after that, that will be up to her. ’
Elena picks up the same knitting project she was working on last time he sat with her.
It’s a lot bigger, but he still can’t tell what it is.
‘Luke … ’ she says, shaking her head. ‘What am I going to do with you? I tell you not to get in contact with Jess’s mum without telling her, but now you have done it anyway, and you still haven’t told her?
’ She drops a stitch and swears in Spanish before looking him.
‘Are you sure? Communication is important in a marriage, Luke. When I think back over the years I spent with Felix, how things were towards the end, I think that is what caused our marriage to fail. We stopped communicating well.’
The conversation drifts on to other things for a while but, eventually, they both fall silent.
A nurse appears to adjust a few things then disappears again.
He checks the clock. Another hour to go before she can be released, and he drives her home.
He hates leaving her alone in her flat afterwards, all that medication flowing around in her system.
‘What?’ he says, when they have some relative privacy again. ‘You don’t think that’s a good idea?’
She sighs. ‘I don’t know, Luke. Yes, on paper it seems like a good way to go, but you have to be careful. Your party is what? A month away?’
‘Six weeks.’
She gives a shrug. ‘That’s a long time to keep a secret from someone you’re living with; that’s all I’m saying.’