Chapter Forty-Nine
Chris is not a golf buddy.
Well, actually she is. Just not the kind of golf buddy I was thinking.
She’s late twenties, slim, pretty. She looks …
well, she looks perky. She even wears one of those visor things, her long blonde hair swept into a high ponytail.
A walking cliché. She reminds me of someone, but it takes me a few moments to realize who.
It’s her eyes that give it away, the exact same shade of blue as Felicity – Flick – Barnes-Schmitt’s.
It was a year before Nick and I broke up.
A beautiful day, the sun high in a deep blue sky, not a cloud in sight.
Only May so not yet too hot, the perfect weather for a pitcher of Pimm’s in a shady beer garden, a light cardigan on hand for when the sun drops below the horizon.
The official reunion hadn’t been planned yet; this was just a couple of girls from school deciding to get together to catch up.
Nick hadn’t been invited, but that didn’t stop him from gatecrashing under some thinly veiled pretence of coming to pick me up to save me getting the train.
I think I was glad to see him at the time, the whole thing had been a bit of a disaster if I’m brutally honest. Just a bunch of girls showing off to see who had ‘won’ at adulthood.
They always did have a competitive streak and our school had never done anything to break that, maybe even encouraging it.
On paper, twenty-three-year-old Bethany Raven was doing really rather well; her first master’s under her belt and well on her way to smash the MPhil she’d always dreamed about, bougie flat in a semi-nice area, attractive boyfriend with an Audi who bought everyone a round of drinks. And not cheap ones either.
But then he’d sat with us and started droning on about his favourite subject.
Golf. A sport I’ve always found so utterly pointless and I struggled to contain my frustration about the tedious nature of his ‘anecdotes’.
Felicity – Flick – had laughed at his jokes, if you can call them that, and touched his arm in a way I wasn’t overly keen on.
She’d mentioned a sister who was a golf instructor somewhere up in Scotland.
Obviously Christina has moved at some point in the last seven years.
Moved to be closer to my husband?
I continue my hunt through the house and finally I find it.
A notebook, tucked down the side of the bed, full of scribbles in handwriting so bad no one else would be able to decipher the words.
It was my trick at school; writing so badly the teacher wouldn’t know what the answer was meant to say and then I could look up the right answer and convince her that was what the scribble said.
Until I learned that actually studying was far easier and less hassle and I stopped the charade.
Luckily, this Bethany didn’t go on a writing course like one of the earlier Bethanys and so her handwriting is exactly the same as mine, the scribbles forming into coherent sentences in front of my eyes.
It’s a diary. Well, kind of. It’s more of a journal detailing every move Nick has made, every outfit, every excuse, every work trip, for the last year.
And the evidence against him is compelling.
Whatever suspicions the picture of Chris churned up, I wasn’t even close to sensing the sheer scale of his infidelity. Or just how blatant he is. Doesn’t he realize how smart we Bethanys are? How easy it would be for us to unpick his web of lies and get right to the heart of his deception?
Why didn’t she leave him? I mean, come on, we’re all thinking it. Why would a smart and fairly – even if I do say so myself – attractive woman put up with this kind of shit?
Nick has been gone for an hour. How long is a round of golf?
Not that I think he’s actually playing golf, but I’m assuming that excuse gives him a certain window, one within which he has plausible reason to stay out.
Two hours? That’s probably the minimum. I set an alarm for forty-five minutes and then start the next stage of my investigations.
He was always anally retentive, an obsessive hoarder of paperwork, all neatly organized into this folder he kept locked away in the bottom drawer of his desk.
He never trusted keys and so he had this keypad lock, the four-digit number changed every month like clockwork.
I do the maths from the date I last knew him to today.
Seventy-three months. His code was 4572 back then.
I scroll the digits to read 4645 and am met by a satisfying click.
Anally retentive but also not all that bright.
What’s the point of a code that’s so easy to crack?
He’s graduated from a folder to a full-blown series of suspension files, each one labelled with its contents for easy identification. It’s almost like he laid everything out for me. Snooping made easy. For a moment I appreciate the efficiency, until I remember that he’s a cheating bastard twat.
My finger lingers over the labels. Where to start?
We paid eight hundred thousand pounds – yes, I almost fainted too – for the house two years ago.
We share a mobile phone contract with EE.
The car is provided by Nick’s company. They also provide life assurance for both of us, a generous pension and a rather cushy thirty days’ holiday per year. Not including bank holidays. Nick is doing pretty well professionally. His payslip from March suggests he even got a nice chunky bonus.
There are no payslips with my name on them. I must access them via an online portal like it’s actually 2024 – most companies have been paperless for a decade.
Last year Nick spent a small fortune on dental work, all the receipts clipped together with a staple.
There are statements for two different savings accounts. One in both our names with just over ￡5,000 in it. The other in just his name, the balance almost ￡50,000.
We got married at a fancy manor house hotel in 2019.
There’s a CD of photos, our stupid faces looking out from the cardboard case.
I glance at the timer on my alarm, only fifteen minutes left and I don’t want to risk him coming home to find me poring over them.
Was I happy that day? I can’t tell from my expression, but then I have always been pretty good at faking it when I need to.
I put the CD back and my fingers brush a manilla envelope.
Drakeley, Cotterhill and Osbourne written across the bottom.
Only fancy lawyers have fancy stationery like this.
The paper seconds this assertion, thick and creamy to the touch as I slide it out.
It’s a prenuptial agreement. The terms of any divorce laid out in black and white, tangled in legalese, but the meaning is clear as day.
If we divorce, for any reason, even if he cheats on me, I get the grand sum of nothing.
Sitting back on my heels I pull the strands together. A prenup that gives me nothing. A joint savings account with only a few thousand pounds in it. A phone contract in his name. A car from his company. No payslips – who am I trying to kid, if there were any, he would make me print them out.
I have nothing.
That’s why this Bethany is still here.
She cannot leave.