Chapter Eight Netta
Chapter Eight
NETTA
The next morning, before her eyes were even open, Netta felt Pete sit on the edge of the bed and reach for her under the sheet.
His fingers trailed the side of her waist, over her hip and onto her thigh, the dry warmth of his palm pressing into her skin.
For a split, sleepy second, she welcomed it, but as her awareness grew, the revelations of the previous night swooped through her mind like a grass fire, setting flames to her skin under his touch.
She shoved his hand away, rolled over and sat up to face him. He was dressed and ready for the office but looked pitiful and unslept, his face arranged into an expression of pathetic apology. A small box sat in the palm of his hand. He opened it to reveal a diamond ring.
‘Netta, will you marry me?’
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yes.’ His hangdog expression was doing nothing to warm Netta’s. ‘I love you so much. I know I screwed up and I’m so sorry.’
Netta squinted her still-sleepy eyes at him. ‘So, you’re asking me to marry you because you messed up and I caught you out?’
‘No. I’ve had the ring for ages. There just hasn’t been the right time. I’ve been so busy with work and everything—’
‘And sexting with Tracey.’
Pete looked at her, unblinking, and snapped the ring box closed.
‘I think maybe it’s still not the right time to ask you to marry me.’ He lowered his gaze sheepishly. ‘I know you’re pissed off. And so you should be. You deserve better from me and I’ll give it to you, Netta, I promise.’
She scooted away from him and scrunched the doona to her chest. ‘If I hadn’t seen that message, how long would it have gone on? And how far would it have gone?’ she said. ‘Do you have any idea how stupid I feel?’
‘You’re not stupid, Netta. I am.’ He at least had the decency to look her in the eye for the admission. ‘You’re wonderful. I don’t know what I was thinking.’
‘Clearly I’m not wonderful enough, Pete.’ She gestured from him to her and back again. ‘Clearly, we aren’t enough for you. Because if we were, I don’t see why you’d need a Tracey.’
Pete shook his head. ‘That’s not true. You’re more than enough.’
Netta held his gaze and her tongue, for just long enough to make the biggest decision she’d made for a long time. ‘The thing is, Pete,’ she started, ‘you’ve made it pretty clear we want different things.’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that if I think about what I want my life to look like in ten years’ time, it’s not this.
It’s not me wondering if I should be checking your phone every time it beeps.
It’s not me freaking out every time you’re late home, imagining you having sex with someone else.
It’s definitely not me feeling sad that we never had a baby because you changed your mind.
Or if we did have one, it’s not me being made to feel like I trapped you with it. ’
‘Netta, what is this?’ Pete’s eyes flared. ‘Are you breaking up with me?’
Netta twisted her fingers into knots, unable to grasp the words she needed. She cast her gaze down to the blanket covering her lap and nodded.
‘Because you found a text message on my phone?’ His voice was sharper, its edges slicing through the tension.
‘Text messages,’ Netta corrected, looking up to him. ‘Plural.’
Pete huffed out a frustrated breath. ‘I know I messed up, but nothing actually happened. There’s no real reason to throw us away.’
‘Seriously?’
Pete held her gaze. ‘Nothing happened.’
Netta couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Those text messages were a long way from nothing in her books. ‘Come on, Pete, whether you touched her or not, none of it is okay. It’s still cheating.’
Pete released a quiet scoff. ‘Calling it cheating seems a bit much.’
‘I’m not going to get into semantics with you, Pete,’ said Netta. ‘It’s a question of integrity. Of commitment! Of honesty! You’re clearly not happy. And to be honest, I’d rather be alone than with someone who isn’t all in.’
‘Be reasonable, Netta! Life isn’t a romance novel.
’ He said it like it was exhausting to explain.
Like she was a child. ‘Life is, well—it’s life!
It’s messy and boring and stressful and then, occasionally, some good stuff happens to balance out the shit.
That’s just the way it is. I made a mistake.
I regret it, but that’s life. I’m not perfect. Nothing is.’
‘That’s so depressing!’ Netta allowed herself to admit the full extent of what a sad old prick Pete could be.
The way he constantly put a limit on fun.
The way he boxed her up whenever the kids were around.
The way he’d expected her to merge herself into his life while only ever making a token effort to become a part of her world, to get to know her friends, to take a proper interest in her career.
‘And before you say it,’ she continued, ‘I’m not a kid.
I know nothing’s perfect. And I know life can be all of those things.
But it can also be beautiful and funny and surprising in a good way.
’ She paused to draw breath. ‘I can’t trust you anymore. ’
‘Right.’ He slammed the ring box onto his bedside table. ‘I guess it’s pretty lucky you didn’t get pregnant then, isn’t it?’
‘I guess so.’
A black hole of silence formed between them, sucking the air out of Netta, scooping up nearly three years’ worth of love and hope and promise and compacting it all into this devastating sledgehammer of a moment.
‘Right. Well, I guess this is it then. Goodbye, Netta.’ He stood and thundered out of the house, slamming the door behind him.
The polite rumble of the Camry’s engine signalled his departure, leaving a void inside Netta’s chest. She felt hollowed out, brittle and huskish. Shaken like a rattle. She checked the time. It was still only seven o’clock.
She tucked her knees to her chest and squeezed them into a tight hug, staring at the door, where her work ID lanyard and keys hung on a hook with her hi-vis yard-duty vest. That’s who she had to be today.
Netta the teacher. Netta the suddenly single, probably infertile, almost forty-year-old on the verge of an existential crisis would have to wait until three thirty.
***
Netta let herself into Freya’s house after work and found her friend in the front room, breastfeeding baby Jed on the worn-out couch.
The day had stretched out forever, her heart pulling and straining as though strapped to a medieval rack, her limbs distractingly light, like they weren’t quite connected to her.
The happy mask she’d determinedly fixed to her face had shattered as soon as she’d gotten back to the car after work, and she’d ugly-cried the entire way from school to Freya’s house in Newport. She looked like shit.
‘Oh my God,’ said Freya, taking in her friend’s puffy, tear-streaked face.
‘What’s going on? Sit, sit.’ She patted the couch and Netta sank down beside her in a jangle of classroom keys, briefly interrupting Jed’s noisy slurping.
Freya wrapped her free arm around Netta’s shoulder. ‘What’s happened? Tell me.’
Netta took a deep, shaky breath. ‘Pete and I. We broke up.’
‘Oh, hon.’ Freya’s face crumpled in empathy. ‘What happened? Are you okay?’
Freya squeezed her tighter as Netta sniffed noisily and told her the whole sorry story, the fury and revulsion on Freya’s face growing with every detail.
‘That fucking snake!’ she said. ‘I’ll kill him!’
‘It’s not just Tracey, though. I’ve felt really lonely, lately.
He’s always at work and when he’s home, he’s usually chained to the desk.
’ Netta paused to allow Freya a snort of derision.
‘And him being so unbothered when the tests came back negative every month was starting to really hurt, because it killed me every time. Makes sense now, I guess. Tracey is just the cherry on top.’
‘Pretty big cherry.’
‘Yeah,’ Netta said miserably.
‘What are you going to do?’ asked Freya. ‘You can’t stay in that house with him for another second.’
‘Oh God, I have no idea.’ Her living arrangements hadn’t even occurred to her amid the fog of the day. There was no way she could stay at Pete’s.
‘Why don’t you move back into your apartment?’ suggested Freya.
‘Honestly? I can’t afford to live there anymore,’ said Netta. ‘And even if I could, I’d have to give the tenants at least four weeks’ notice, and that would be a pretty harsh thing to do at this time of year when Christmas is just around the corner.’
Freya pulled her closer. ‘You can stay here with us in the crazy house until you work something out if you like.’
Netta smiled gratefully. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course! You can look after the plant morgue for me,’ Freya said, eyeing the fiddle leaf fig corpse in the corner of the room.
‘I think I’m in trouble, Frey. I can’t cover my mortgage on my own.
Not since interest rates went up. I’m already paying the difference between the tenant’s rent and the weekly payments.
Even if I just go and rent a crappy studio or a room in a share house somewhere, I won’t be able to pay my rent and make up the shortfall on the mortgage.
I’ll probably have to sell it. I’m screwed, Freya.
I’ve lost Pete. I’ve probably lost my chance at ever having a baby.
And now I’m going to lose my beautiful little apartment too.
’ Netta slumped deeper into the couch and closed her eyes.
‘A lottery win would be amazing right about now.’
‘Yeah, the lottery would be great,’ agreed Freya, switching Jed to her other breast. ‘Or, I don’t know—and this might sound nuts, but hear me out—what about if you got an offer of a lot of money from, say, Morrison Maplestone, to return a book to London? Oh, wait …’
Netta fixed her friend with a worn-out expression. ‘Don’t. I can’t do it. I can’t go back there.’
‘Not even if it meant you could keep the apartment?’
Netta felt she was wedged between a wall of fire and a bottomless cliff. Neither direction was going to end well. ‘I don’t know …’
‘Look, I know London is a no-go zone for you,’ said Freya softly. ‘But right now, I reckon you’ve got more to lose by not going. Maybe you need to weigh up what’s scarier.’
Netta knew Freya was right. But Freya also had no idea what going back to London would do to her. How it would curdle her straight back into the scrambled mess she’d been when she’d left. And right now, she was already about as messy as she could get without having a complete breakdown.
‘I hear what you’re saying,’ she said. ‘But it’s not that simple. Anyway, the lottery isn’t my only option, you know.’ Netta attempted a smile. ‘There’s always OnlyFans if things get desperate.’
Freya snorted. ‘Now there’s a good side hustle for a primary school teacher. You should definitely do that.’
Despite herself, Netta laughed. She rested her head on Freya’s shoulder and sighed, gently stroking the hair of the milk-sozzled baby nestled in her friend’s arms.
The brief moment of peace was shattered by Kit squealing from the next room and Maisie shrieking, ‘Mummy! Kit’s biting on my Barbie again so I whacked him!’
Freya rolled her eyes. ‘Last week he bit Elsa’s head right off and stuck it on Anna’s foot like a shoe. She has reason to be overprotective.’
‘I’ll go,’ said Netta, pushing herself out of the couch. Saving the day for two of her favourite little people was just the distraction she needed.