Chapter 2
TWO
Victoria
‘Read me your message,’ I tell Reese as I stand in the work bathroom, watching the door in case someone comes in.
Listening, I am shocked to find it’s exactly the same as mine.
The truth about your life is that it’s built on a lie. It’s been a long time Victoria and I’m finally ready to talk. You had better be ready to listen. Camilla.
Reese and I have different perspectives on what happened. We both played very different parts in how things went down. And yet the threat is the same to both of us.
I can hear the panic in Reese’s voice because she always panics first and thinks later.
Reese would stand in front of a burning building shouting ‘fire, fire,’ with a hose in her hands without thinking of turning it on.
I have been her metaphorical fire fighter for a long time, advising her to keep calm, telling her what I think she should do and generally keeping her from spiralling.
But right now, all I can offer Reese is my certainty that I will not let Camilla ruin our lives again.
‘I have to go, don’t reply to her until we’ve had a chance to speak,’ I tell her as the bathroom door swings open. ‘I’ll call you when I’m home.’
Glancing at the time on my phone as I leave the bathroom, I can see that I still have at least a couple of hours until I’m free to think about what to do.
At my desk, I will the time to pass as Camilla’s threatening message circles in my head. How dare she tell me my life is built on a lie? Bitch. Who does she think she is?
I don’t want to have to stay late but I don’t think I’ve ever gotten out of the office before 6:00 p.m. The world of advertising does not respect the nine to five work day and I’m one of the few women in the office with children.
Most of the men I work with have families but they have little to no impact on how long they can work, how late they can stay out, or what they have to do when they get home.
It’s not fair. It will never be fair and perhaps I would be happier if I just accepted that, rather than allowing the unfairness of it all to drive me insane.
‘Do you have time to have a chat about the new organic soap account?’ Gloria, who is twenty-eight and single, asks me as I am finally walking out at 6:01 p.m. and instead of stopping to speak to her, I hold up my hand and shake my head.
I want to be on the train, sitting in silence and going over the message.
But once I’m settled in my seat, instead of silence, I get a barrage of emails that need to be dealt with immediately, lest the whole world stop spinning.
I am exhausted when I open my front door to see my son, Cash, who starts talking the minute he sees me.
‘Mum, Mum, Mum, Mum. Dylan fell over and he hurt his knee and there was blood whooshing everywhere and Dad said that he might throw up because it was so gross and I helped because I got the Band-Aid and Dad said that one day I can be a doctor and I think that would be cool because doctors get to see gross stuff all the time, like every day.’ My five-year-old is literally jumping up and down with excitement as he talks.
I am still holding my computer bag and I haven’t even closed the front door.
All I want to be able to do is to sit quietly and figure out a way to play this, to deal with this awful new development of contact from someone I never wanted to see again.
But there’s no way there will be the time and space for that for hours.
Just like it does every night, my life has rushed to meet me as I walk in the door.
I don’t have time to think about what to do with the message because I have to put out metaphorical fires on the home front now.
‘Dylan,’ I call, as I walk into the living room, concerned that Cash’s twin brother has really hurt himself and irritated at the same time that Ed didn’t call me to tell me what happened.
My sons’ names are something that I outsourced to Ed, much to my frustration.
But I was so zonked out after a fifteen-hour labour that ended in an emergency C-section, that I told him he could choose.
We had discussed the names when I was pregnant but we never settled on my choice of Ezra and Oliver so Ed chose to name his sons after Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash.
At least they both have the middle name, Michael, after my brother. Ed did, at least, get that right.
The names are cool if you have any musical knowledge but I can’t help thinking that my boys, who are identical with my fine black hair and Ed’s piercing green eyes, may one day resent the names they were given, especially Cash who already, at five, has had to explain where his name came from.
Dylan bounces into the room, a Band-Aid on his knee.
‘What happened to your knee?’
He shrugs. ‘Just… blood,’ he says and then he climbs up onto the coffee table and leaps onto the sofa.
Dylan takes my approach to things that happen.
If he has nothing to say, he says nothing, unlike Cash who talks non-stop, like his father.
When we first started living together, I would sit in my car after work for half an hour before going into the apartment we had bought together so that I had the energy to answer all of Ed’s questions and listen to him talk about his day.
Dylan jumps from the sofa back onto the coffee table, which is a solid timber block, capable of taking his weight.
‘Please don’t do that,’ I say, but not with any force.
Obviously, he’s fine and that’s why Ed didn’t call me.
No one exaggerates like a five-year-old boy.
The sofa is covered in large blankets in a last-ditch effort to protect the pale gold fabric.
When we bought the sofa, a year into our marriage, we weren’t sure about having children.
And we certainly never anticipated the need for IVF when my biological clock began to tick so loudly it kept me up at night. And despite knowing that twins were possible, I never expected that either.
I prefer my life to be neat, orderly, no surprises. But you can’t have that all the time. I feel like I have dealt with the curveballs I’ve been thrown, but this strange message is more than just a curveball.
Camilla is still angry. And that is very bad for me and for my friendship with Reese. Camilla was a hard person, who did awful things sixteen years ago. I shudder to think what sixteen years of nursing a grudge has turned her into and what she might mean to do because of that.
She can only be intent on doing damage. I don’t want her anywhere near me, my family, or my best friend. There are too many things Reese doesn’t know. Too many things I never wanted her to know.
‘Let’s play Star Wars,’ shouts Cash as Dylan bounces back onto the sofa.
‘Yes, yes, where’s my lightsaber?’
‘I’ll get it, Dylan, I’ll get it,’ says Cash, always willing to do what it takes so that his brother wants to play a game with him.
I’ll have to watch that as they get older.
It’s bath time but I need five minutes before I deal with that.
Both boys leave the living room and I survey the chaos of spilled Lego, jackets that should have been hung up, shoes that should be on the shoe rack, a pile of books that could be readers from school and a myriad of other things.
I move automatically, bending down to start cleaning up.
Camilla had a difficult life before she ever met me and Reese because she came from a very dysfunctional home life. She was, and obviously still is, a very damaged person.
You had better be ready to listen. That’s a disturbing sentence.
What if I’m not ready to listen? What if I have no interest in hearing from her at all? What is she going to do then?
How does she intend to make me listen and is that something I should be worried about?