Chapter Thirty-Six
JESS
‘Elena has cancer. Breast cancer.’
‘But … ? What … ?’
‘So, yes, I’ve been texting her more than I normally would.’
I feel shame wash over me like a hot wave and I brace myself against it, stiffening my spine, ready to fight it off. ‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me?’ I cry. Even more importantly, why didn’t Elena tell me? I thought we were friends. Not besties, but friends all the same.
He shakes his head softly. ‘She didn’t want anyone to know.’
‘But why?’
He shrugs. ‘I don’t get it either. I think she doesn’t want anyone to see her as weak, as …
less than, if you know what I mean? And her family is five thousand miles away in Bogotá, Felix is in the wind, so I’ve been trying to be encouraging, you know, be a good friend.
I watched my mum go through this when I was sixteen and she still found it hard with the love and support of a big family around her.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to do it on your own. ’
Of course he can’t. And of course, he would step up and be the support system for someone struggling.
This is Luke. I feel devastated for Elena, I can’t even begin …
but that doesn’t mean I’m one hundred per cent happy that Luke has kept this from me.
If he’d only been open about it, we might not be in this mess at the moment, but the truth is, Elena didn’t trust me with this information, and neither did he.
‘I wouldn’t have told anyone. You know that.’
‘Like I said, Elena wanted to keep it to herself.’
Somehow, I feel this is something to do with me, a flaw they both perceive that I didn’t know I had. ‘But you can see how those messages looked to me? You can see why I thought what I did? I mean, how was I supposed to know?’
‘You could have just asked me about it.’
‘I did!’
‘Only after I had to pester you to tell me what was up because you were sulking.’
I push my chair back and stand, taking a few steps back. ‘I was not sulking!’
Luke just looks at me.
Okay, so maybe I was.
‘Anyone would have been blindsided seeing messages like that on their spouse’s phone. What would you have done if you’d seen texts from a random man – say, Ahmed from the physio practice – saying he missed me and wanted to hug me? Are you telling me your alarm bells wouldn’t have been ringing?’
Luke sits in one of the empty chairs around the coffee table, frowning. ‘Okay, yes … I don’t think I would have jumped right in and accused you of having an affair—’
‘I didn’t actually—’
‘But I wouldn’t have been happy, so you’re right about that. But I don’t know what else I could have done, Jess. I didn’t want to betray Elena’s trust, but I also haven’t betrayed you in any way, you have to believe that.’
I rest my hands on the back of the chair I’ve just vacated. ‘I do,’ I reply, and some of the tension in my shoulders and jaw dissipates. ‘I just wish you’d had a bit more faith in me, that we could have handled this as a team.’
Luke has been looking uncomfortable but amiable, but now his expression clouds over.
‘Trust goes both ways. You went from a couple of ambiguous text messages to infidelity at light speed, not even stopping to ask if you were headed in the right direction. If anything, it’s you who doesn’t trust me, and that hurts, because never once have I given you reason to doubt me on that front. ’
I stare back at him, unable to give him a good response.
‘Why is that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I answer quietly.
‘Why was it so easy to believe that of me?’
‘I don’t know!’ I’m feeling this horrible churning inside that’s making my words come out louder and harder than I mean them to.
How do I stop it? I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.
I feel the same way I do when someone calls unexpectedly and the house is untidy.
I’m looking frantically at all the messy things I’m feeling, wondering where I can stuff them so they’re out of sight, out of mind.
‘Neither do I,’ Luke says, turning his gaze to the flecks in the marble floor.
He looks so hopeless, so crestfallen, that it brings tears to my eyes.
I want to reach out to him, but I don’t know if he’ll want me to.
When he meets my eyes again, he says, ‘What have we got, Jess, if we don’t have trust?
Do you even love me if you think that badly of me? ’
‘I do love you!’ I sob, even as my hands remain Velcroed to the chair back. If this weird nightmare has taught me anything, it’s taught me that. ‘And I … I don’t want to lose you. Please, Luke. You have to believe me!’
He studies me for a moment. ‘I do believe you love me, but … ’
‘But … ?’
‘But what do we do if you don’t trust me to stay, to be the husband I promised you I would be? It’s going to eat away at our relationship and I can’t see us making the next five years, let alone the next fifty, if that’s the case.’
My throat closes at his eerily prophetic words, and I swallow.
‘Do you even want that?’
I nod furiously, and Luke gets up and walks to the window to look out at the cobbled alley below.
I stare at his back and try to work out what to do, what to say.
I’ve been trying so hard for the last five days, but now I feel further away than ever from being the kind of wife I wanted to be for him.
It’s all amounted to nothing. I hear Mrs Wonderful’s laughter in my head, mocking me for even thinking I could ever measure up to her.
Maybe I should leave him to Elena. She would certainly do a much better job than I have done.
I wonder if I should go and stand behind him, wondering what words I can string together to make things right, but I have nothing, so I sit down heavily on the end of the bed and put my head in my hands. I’ve got nothing else. I give up.
‘I’m so sorry, Luke. I do love you, I really do.
And I know I don’t always show it or say it, but I think …
’ Words form in my head, but I have to push them out of my mouth.
I despise myself for even half-thinking these thoughts in my darkest moments.
These are things I’ve never wanted to admit to myself, let alone my husband.
‘I think that I’ve always thought you’d leave me one day. ’
Luke twists around sharply when I say this, his eyes narrowed.
‘But that’s nothing to do with you! It’s to do with me, with how I don’t think I’m enough for you.
Why wouldn’t you find someone better – someone like Elena – who isn’t emotionally constipated, who doesn’t back off and shut down when things get tough?
You deserve someone like you, who can meet you as an equal.
So, you’re right, I don’t have faith, but it’s not you that I don’t believe in. It’s me.’
Luke rushes over to me and scoops me up into his arms. His voice is thick as he pulls me close and kisses my head, my face, my eyelids. ‘Why would you think that? You’re everything to me, don’t you know that?’
I cry so hard that I lose my sense of time and space, of everything but the warmth of Luke’s body pressed against mine.
He holds me close as I let it all out, and when my sobbing gives way to sniffling, he pulls away, pushes my hair out of my face and holds it back with his hands so he can look at me.
‘I believe in you,’ he says seriously, looking deep into my eyes so I know he means it. ‘And if you can’t, I’ll believe for the both of us. But can you believe in us, Jess? The fact that we’re stronger together than we are apart? I need you. I know you may not believe that, but I do.’
I blink to release the tears welling up behind my lashes and nod. ‘Yes,’ I reply hoarsely. ‘I can believe in us.’
Luke nods, as if he has decided something.
‘Wait there,’ he says, and goes to his bedside table and rummages around inside.
When he returns, he holds up a now-familiar navy-blue leather ring box and carefully eases the lid open.
‘I know I offered this to you once before, and it wasn’t really what you wanted, but it occurred to me that something that didn’t make a great engagement ring might well make a lovely fifth anniversary gift as an eternity ring.
Do you want it? If not, we can get something different, although – due to current budget constraints – it might have to have fewer diamonds. ’
I stare at the band, with its leaf-shaped diamonds and tiny, berry-like emeralds and my breath catches. It worked. It really worked. ‘I love it,’ I whisper, then meet his eyes with a smile. ‘I would be honoured to wear it.’
Because now I know what it means to him. And to me.
Luke’s expression of raw hopefulness breaks into a wide grin, and he takes the ring out of the box and slides it on my finger to nestle next to my engagement ring.