Chapter 25
Jess
Jess’s life is a series of moments. The precious, solitary moments before she drags Elodie to school in the morning, her time spent in the hushed library stacks, then the moments afterward when she collects Elodie from school and Tom gets home from work. She can divide up her days into sections, compartmentalize them like her to-do list. And right now she knows which moments in her day she prefers.
It all began with the chicken. After her shift, she stands in the line at the butcher’s in town, one street down from the library. The thawing snow has left streams of water running through the square, and now it pools in the heel of her boot, soaking her sock. She can feel a cold coming on, a thickening in her nose and throat, an itching in her ears. And her limbs, her very joints, ache and fizz, every fiber of her longing for a bath and a mug of hot chocolate to hold in her hands. It’s the same every December, in the run-up to the festive season, when everything seems to get so busy, when she can hardly find a moment to breathe.
She has already canceled on Gillian, sending a quick text to let her know she can’t meet for coffee after the school run tomorrow. The very thought of carefully deflecting Gillian’s attempts to gossip about Carrie for half an hour leave her wrung out and irritated.
When she reaches the front of the line, Adam Monks, with his white hat and striped apron, has only chicken thighs and lamb cutlets left. She sighs through her nose, eyeing them both before pointing to the chicken. She hands over her bank card, listening for the high-pitched tap that signals her account being drained just that little bit more.
Then she smiles a vacant half smile at Adam, the boy who is now a man. She remembers him picking his nose in year three, when he sat on the classroom carpet next to her. That’s the thing about staying in your hometown into adulthood: each day and every conversation is layered with memory upon memory. Some days she feels like she’s wading through a stream of them.
After Adam bags up the chicken, she leaves the shop and hurries to her car, dodging the rivers of meltwater and being prodded by umbrella spokes as she brushes past people. She dashes across the main square, feeling the damp squelch in her left boot, and unlocks her parked car with a whispered “At bloody last.”
She doesn’t usually drive, since she’s always thinking about getting her steps in for the day. But just like the past few days, she woke up this morning with a bone-deep weariness. She has fought against it—swimming against a current of fatigue—but this morning it tugged her under. She hustled Elodie into the car, warmed her hands on the hot air choking out of the vents by the steering wheel, and decided to sign up at the gym instead of battling the dwindling minutes to squeeze in her usual walk to school and then to the library.
Now Jess rummages in a shopping bag and pulls out a paper packet, shiny with grease. She dips her hand inside, breaks off a piece of cinnamon bun, and exhales as she chews. She has a full twenty minutes before she has to pick Elodie up from school. She dusts crumbs off her hand and reaches into another bag on the passenger seat, then pulls out the hardback that’s just come into the library. The latest in a series she loves, it’s a book she’s been waiting for. She takes another bite of the bun, settles into the car seat, and loses herself contentedly in the first chapter, the heat still blasting out of the vents, the chicken still sitting on the passenger seat.
After picking up Elodie, after listening to the other mums complain about the number of sweets their children were given on Halloween—about how it’s become such a toxic part of our culture—she drives home, listening with only half an ear to Elodie talk about the boy called Phillip in her class who stole her seat at lunch. What Jess is really thinking about is how long it’ll be before she can settle into a bath and read the next chapter of her new library book. Reading a new book is the quiet place of joy she’s slipped into ever since she was little. The rustle of the pages and the tug of the characters’ lives feel so vivid, so real. When she finds a good book, a gripping story, it’s like winning the lottery. She hopes Elodie will find that same joy when she starts choosing books of her own.
Sometimes Jess wishes that Tom would pick up Elodie from school. That it wasn’t always her job to race from the library, pick up dinner, and then rush over to the school to collect their daughter. She wishes he could be the one who remembers to send a birthday card to his aunt, or the one who packs the rucksack when they go out for a day trip as a family.
After she hustles Elodie inside, Tom arrives home earlier than usual. He has that wild-eyed look he gets nowadays, as though his thoughts are forever wandering across the fields to a certain cottage, to a certain person. Jess wants to say something. She wants to open her mouth and let it all pour out—all her feelings about Carrie, about him, about how he never picks up his damn socks off the bathroom floor when he showers, about knowing he’s looked up Carrie on Facebook. He’s probably stalking her Instagram account as well, seeing all the pictures of the renovation, her morning walks, her perfect existence. Not that Jess scrolls her feed at all. Obviously.
But she doesn’t say any of these things. Jess just sniffs at the chicken, forehead dimpling slightly. “Does this smell okay to you?”
she asks, turning to him. She places the thighs on a baking tray, intending to roast them and make a rice dish on the stove with some veggies. But something smells off. And even now, twenty minutes after getting out of the car, she still has a feeling of motion sickness. As though she is still traveling forward, propelled in a way that her body is revolting against.
It has to be the chicken.
Tom bends over it, his forehead pinched like hers, and breathes deeply. “Smells normal to me. Do you want me to do dinner? Maybe go up and take a bath, or—”
Jess is gone before he finishes the sentence. Soon she’s wallowing in a cloud of marshmallow bubbles, ducking her head under the surface so she can no longer hear the rumbling of her husband’s voice or the tinny notes of the TV program Elodie is watching. She drifts, imagining a weekend of being totally alone, answerable to no one but herself. Then she dries her hands, carefully turns to the next chapter of the library book, and loses herself once more in the pages.
She lingers too long in the bathwater. Finally admitting defeat, Jess pulls herself out of the tepid water. She brushes her hair back, pulls on joggers and a hoodie, and breathes a sigh of relief when she catches the scents of garlic and chicken. At least Tom is actually cooking dinner. At least there’s that.
Jess goes downstairs, idly searches through the fridge for the half-empty bottle of sauvignon blanc, and, spotting it, pours herself a few inches in her favorite wineglass. Tom is thumbing through the TV channels, and Elodie has already tucked into a plate of chicken and pasta with a few circles of cucumber on the side. Elodie won’t eat rice, so they always have to cook pasta separately for her. Just one of the many Elodie-isms Jess half hates, half loves.
“I’m going out in a bit,”
Tom says to her, not even bothering to turn around. Not even bothering to offer up an explanation.
Jess tenses and takes a measured sip of wine. It’s sharp on her tongue, all ice and crisp citrus. “Right.”
“Don’t be like that.”
Tom sighs, abandoning the remote control next to Elodie, who still sits glued to the TV, her dinner on a lap tray, her little legs poking out like sticks.
“I’m just tired, Tom. Just tired,”
Jess says quietly.
Tom says nothing for a moment as he gets up, stretches, then looks at her. “I went to see her. When she first got back.”
Jess’s heart stops. “What?”
“I thought it would help. I didn’t think she would stay this long, to be honest—”
“And you didn’t . . . tell me?”
Jess says, clutching the stem of her wineglass so hard it could snap. Fear and anger war inside her, tying her stomach in nauseous knots. “Is that where you’re going tonight?”
“No! No, of course not. Just meeting Billy for a drink.”
He brushes a hand down his face. “I guess I wanted to know why. Why she left like she did, why after all these years she’s back now. I’m sorry, I should have told you.”
Jess takes another sip of wine, then another. She’s trying very hard to hold it all together, to hold the shriek of rage and hurt inside. “You shouldn’t have gone at all.”
“I realize that now. Dumb move. I’m sorry.”
Jess closes her eyes, a dull thumping beginning in her temples. This is what she’d been afraid of with Carrie’s return. And really, with what she did all those years ago, did she have any right to be cross?
She snaps her eyes open and finds Tom looking at her uncertainly. As though she could explode at him, blowing up their carefully constructed life. Her fear deepens, beating back her anger. Does she want this argument? Does she really want to damage what they have? She takes a quick breath, breaking her gaze from his. “It’s understandable you’d want answers, I suppose. As long as that’s all it was. Just please . . . please don’t go behind my back again.”
“I’m sorry,”
he mutters again.
She eyes him as he moves around the kitchen, pulling out plates and piling up the roasted chicken and veggie risotto he’s pulled together. She winces at the oily tideline around the edge of the pan, but says nothing. She’ll have to soak it overnight.
He places the two dinner plates with careful, clipped precision on the dining table. “Glass of water?”
“Please,”
she says, sitting down. A wave of nausea overtakes her as she looks down at the food, but she begins to eat it anyway, almost mechanically.
Tom sits beside her, and she notices the creases appearing in his eyelids as he tenses his jaw, chewing and staring into space. When did they become so distant? So unattuned? She tries to tell herself that his going to see Carrie is nothing, that they were together so long ago, it means nothing now. But Jess’s heart skips, a dull thud echoing through her like a stone dashed across the surface of a lake. She can’t help picturing their limbs tangled together, Tom whispering promises into Carrie’s ear. Jess’s stomach twists, bile rises up her throat, and she pushes back her chair roughly.
Tom looks up. “Jess?”
“Just something stuck in my teeth,”
she murmurs.
“Jess, I’m sorry, I don’t need to go out—”
She closes the bathroom door, cutting him off, locks it, and braces her hands on the edge of the sink. She counts to ten, slowly, mouthing the words as the storm clawing through her begins to subside. Then she blows out a breath, takes a drink of cool water straight from the tap, and dashes the back of her hand across her mouth.
When she looks up into the mirror, she can’t find herself. All Jess can see is a tired woman with skin too pale, eyes a little bloodshot. She grips the edge of the sink again, staring at herself. This is what she chose: domesticity, simple and orderly everyday calm punctuated by quiet joys—like reading a new book. But she’s off-kilter, unbalanced, and it isn’t really about Tom or Elodie. It’s about her.
“You know what you’ve got to do,”
she says to her reflection. “You know.”
Tom leaves after Elodie is in bed. He insisted on doing the whole bedtime routine and fussed around Jess with medicine and an extra blanket until she told him to please go out. Now he’s definitely gone, and she calls her mum to come over and sit in the lounge. “Just an hour, Mum. I need to pick up a few bits at the supermarket. I was rushed off my feet this week.”
She’s already driving before she changes her mind. She picks up that item down the aisle she usually avoids, the one in a slim box, and hustles into the supermarket loo. The queasiness claws at her, making her feel just the way she did the last time, and she wants to be certain. It might be the chicken, but she doesn’t think so. Afterward, she’s not doing a big shop. There’s somewhere else she needs to go, a place she has to keep secret. She’s going to the one place she’s avoided, down the old country lanes she knows better in the dark, or on foot, than in the daylight.
She steels herself for a night that could change everything.