Hannah
She could barely lift her head from the pillow.
The act of having to find her phone, to look at its screen, to compose a text that would alert Esther to the fact that she wouldn’t be coming in today – without encouraging any follow-ups – seemed to require as much energy as a mountain climb.
Her head, her limbs, her heart – they all felt weighted down with her sadness. As if it was trying to sink her.
As if, now, he was.
She couldn’t decide what had happened.
On one hand, Jason was going through something.
He was stressed. And, last night, also tired, injured and some stage of inebriated.
He’d got upset. He was just trying to get her to stay.
The cut on his arm had made things seem worse, more horrible, than they actually were. It was just a moment. No big deal.
On the other, he’d told her he wasn’t going to leave his wife. He’d been wearing a wedding ring, something she’d never seen before, not even on the night they first met at the Chambers event. He’d shouted at her. Hurt her, even if it wasn’t intentional. Frightened her. Those eyes of his …
She’d seen someone else in them, for a second. No, not someone else – no one. It was like she’d got to see, just for a heartbeat, behind the curtain, and it turned out there was no one there.
But on her arm, there were definitely five crimson fingertips.
At some point she managed to crawl into the shower, make coffee, brush her teeth.
She blocked his number and his email. Collected everything he’d ever given her into a cardboard box, which she left by the door to take down to the bins.
Pulled a bottle of white wine from the fridge and sat in front of a flickering TV, not watching it, late into the night.
The following morning, Hannah woke up determined to forget about him. She was going to slip back into her old life as if nothing had happened. He wasn’t going to get to leave a mark on her life, too. No fucking way.
But she soon realized it wasn’t going to be that simple.
Only a few months ago, she had valued her alone time above all else; now it made her feel unsettled, and restless, itchy.
She wasn’t in the mood for other people, so she declined the invites that might have saved her from it.
The gaps in her days were a series of interminable boredoms and at night, she couldn’t sleep.
Without him, everything felt empty – which made her absolutely furious, both at him and at herself.
He had lied to her and ruined the life she’d loved.
She was letting him ruin it.
Still.
Those first few weeks, Friday and Saturday evenings were the worst. She started bringing home a bottle of wine to pass the hours before bed and to make sleep easier to summon.
Soon, she needed one bottle for each night.
The weekend Hannah found herself draining her entire supply before it was even dark on Saturday, she knew she had to do something that wasn’t this.
She booked the first hotel that came up when she searched for luxury hotel sea view spa, which happened to be in Ardmore, a two-and-a-half-hour drive away.
She messaged Esther to say she was taking Monday off – there’d been a lot of random days off lately; Esther had a pretty good idea what was going on – and threw a few things into a case.
She hit the road first thing the next morning with a large travel mug of blisteringly hot black coffee.
She had great plans. A swim in the sea, a massage, a loop of the cliff walk.
A lovely dinner, a good book and one glass of wine – one she’d actually taste and savour – at a table overlooking the water.
But a storm had churned the bay into a sludge of seaweed, it was still raining when she got there, and the book turned out to have an unexpected subplot about a homewrecker written from the point of view of the innocent, heartbroken wife.
At lunch, the dining room was wall-to-wall couples and a lone guest so unusual that the waitress seemed to suspect that Hannah was a food critic on assignment.
When she was informed that the spa was closed because of a burst pipe, it took all she had not to crumble into tears in front of the receptionist and the American family of four waiting behind her, who kept saying Ireland with three distinct syllables.
Hannah asked for a bottle of wine to be delivered to her room and then cried herself to sleep.
She felt grey. She looked grey. Everything looked grey to her.
It was as if those few months with him had been so vibrant, they’d washed away all the colour from the rest of her life.
The worst part was she missed him.
One morning, on her way to work, Hannah stopped in the street to compose a text she’d already mistyped three times while on the move.
As she’d pressed SEND, she felt eyes on her.
She was standing directly outside a branch of Shreddr, the one she’d once walked past every morning until she’d deliberately changed her route a few weeks ago.
The text had distracted her and she’d automatically gone her old way.
Inside, two employees sat in the window, looking at her. Now, one said something to the other and they both laughed.
Everyone who worked at Shreddr. Her mother and brother. The girls and their husbands, and whoever else the girls had gossiped with.
They all knew what had happened.
Hannah could feel it: their judgement pouring fuel on her shame.
She imagined their conversations. She was the silly bitch, dumb enough to believe he wasn’t married and naive enough, afterwards, to believe he’d leave his wife.
But he was a midlife crisis, a moment of madness, momentarily led astray by a temptress.
Good for him, to have come to his senses and gone back to the woman who had been there from the beginning, who had made him what he was.
As she moved to go, she saw them.
On the opposite side of the street, coming this way. It was like something from a movie. The volume of the world quietened, faded, silenced. Everything else blurred while they took on a sharper focus.
Jason and Erin.
Together.
Not just together, but holding hands.
The shock was visceral, as if she’d collided with a physical force.
Winded, Hannah stopped dead. She’d only gone a few steps; she could still see the Shreddr employees in the window in her peripheral vision.
A body slammed into her from behind, snapping her back.
She mumbled an apology, got a dirty look in return.
Then she started to panic. In another few steps, they’d see her.
Without thinking, she ducked into the nearest open door.
A jewellery shop. No other customers. Hannah smiled weakly at the woman behind the counter and then turned to look at the items in the window display.
But she looked through them to the street beyond, waiting for Jason and Erin to appear in the frame.
She wondered what the people who knew them called them, which order was the usual one.
JasonandErin or ErinandJason. She thought about how many years people had been calling them that, how long they’d been a unit.
Then, there they were.
The last time Hannah had seen this woman in the flesh – the only other time – she hadn’t known that she was looking at Jason’s wife, the woman who’d been his partner for his whole adult life. Now, she couldn’t help but study her like an exhibit in a museum.
And over here, we have the Wife. The woman he proposed to, said, ‘I do’ to, built a home with.
You think you know him, after a few months?
It would take you another sixteen years to know him as well as she already does – and she effectively grew up with him.
They grew up together. Those are the kind of memories with which you’ll never catch up.
Erin was smiling, looking up at him. She said something and he laughed, big, throwing his head back. She was carrying a shopping bag. Céline. There was a box inside. A handbag, probably, costing thousands. He lifted a hand to his face and, in the sun, something glinted.
The wedding ring.
Hannah didn’t want him. She missed him, but she didn’t want him. She couldn’t; the man she’d felt something for was a phantom. A lie. Dead. Gone.
What she was feeling now, what was surging through her, rising up, taking hold, it wasn’t jealousy or envy but pure, burning, all-consuming rage.
She couldn’t get back to the life she’d had before he’d crashed into it, lied and left again. But he had, evidently, slipped right back into his.
She was in ruins, he was in repair.
Repaired, past tense.
Walking down the street with the woman he claimed he didn’t love, who he didn’t even like, holding her hand.
What had he told her? What lies had she been fed? Presumably he’d had to cop to something; the dogs in the street knew he’d been having an affair. Hannah could take an educated guess. It was nothing. It was meaningless. Not worth ending our marriage over. She meant nothing to him, now.
She was nothing.
He was an extinction-level-event meteor that had crashed into her planet, but she was a pebble that had dropped into his ocean. For him, the storm had already passed, the sun had come out, and its surface was once again gently shimmering.
Looking at them now, you wouldn’t even know anything had happened.
And it wasn’t fair.
It just wasn’t fair.
She couldn’t let him get away with this. He was the one who’d been married, the liar, the cheat. He should suffer the consequences of his actions.
Jason needed to pay for what he’d done.