Chapter 1
Katie scratched her head where the cheap brown wig was itching her scalp and scrunched down further in the seat of the borrowed car.
She blinked her eyes furiously, the gloom of the wet summer’s evening making it feel later than it was.
Pinching the soft skin on the inside of her arm, Katie pressed her lips together as it smarted. She had to stay awake.
Katie slurped on the dregs of her cold coffee. Good manners were not worth the effort in the confines of a car alone. She rechecked her phone. Nothing from Ryan. She dropped her phone into her lap.
Ryan, her one true love.
Or Ryan, the Big Fat Liar?
Peeling the wrapper off a mint she had found in a packet in the glove box, she popped it into her mouth and sucked noisily, the boiled sweet rattling against her teeth.
Twilight arrived early as the cloudy and rainy day hurried the onset of night. The house diagonally across the street was still in darkness.
She thought again about the message he sent her several weeks ago. A message that was clearly meant for someone else.
It had popped up on her phone lock screen.
Yes, sure, later babes. See you at the house. Can’t wait! x
Then a kissy face emoji.
She was surprised at first when she received it, out of the blue one bright Tuesday afternoon some weeks ago.
She read it three times. Ryan didn’t call her babes.
He called her darling on the rare occasions he used terms of endearment at all.
And Ryan didn’t use emojis. And what exactly was happening later?
At their house? Had she forgotten a dinner party she’d promised to cater?
It wouldn’t be the first time. Katie reflected on the rather sloppy tinned tuna au gratin she had thrown together last time, much to the dismay of one of their guests, who turned out to be a vegetarian.
She had studied the message for a moment, a niggle of suspicion itching at her insides.
She squashed it down. This was Ryan. Her Ryan, as in Katie and Ryan, who had been together for years, and went together like wine and cheese.
People said things like, ‘Will Katie and Ryan be coming?’ Not, ‘Will Katie be coming?’ Always the duo.
Her fingers hovered over the keypad, then she tapped in the code to unlock her phone and look at the message thread. As the message app opened, the text disappeared and was replaced with something else.
This message was deleted.
The little niggle gnawed at Katie’s insides, and she felt her pulse quicken. The cheese toasty she’d eaten for lunch curdled in her stomach.
She had dropped her phone on her desk, shoving it away from her as if she wondered what it might do next. No new message came through from Ryan. Nothing to explain what he meant.
Work had saved her that afternoon. She was too busy to dwell overly much as she onboarded two new clients, both delighted that she was available to work with them, and she put her phone on do not disturb.
But the meetings were exhausting, as question after question about the text pattered noisily through her mind throughout her meetings, like having the TV on in the background while carrying on a conversation.
She worked hard to force life and warmth into her voice when she explained the working process and struggled more than once to make her smile meet her eyes when she laughed at her client’s jokes and thanked them for their business.
When she finally closed down her computer in her home office that evening, her shoulders slumped, and she hunched forward over her desk.
Katie scowled at the memory, shook her head as if to dislodge it, and worked the plastic sweet wrapper into a tiny ball between her fingers. Another ten minutes, she told herself, and then the madness had to end.
The little semi-detached house down the street marked itself out with a hot pink front door and hanging baskets with fake pink begonias on either side that bloomed away gaudily in all seasons.
Now, they swung gently as the warm summer rain patted down on them.
Katie squinted through the rain-soaked windscreen, the water running down the glass distorting everything, turning her view of the little dwelling into an abstract painting of a house.
The one thing she could see for sure was that the house was in darkness, save for a small porch light that had come on as the overcast afternoon slowly turned into a dim and cloudy evening.
Maybe she was mistaken about it all. It was possible, she told herself.
It was likely, even, that Ryan was out there right now, on this miserable evening, diligently working away to help them to a better future together.
Meanwhile, she was sitting in a car in a bad disguise and wallowing in suspicion that was slowly eating away at the foundations of their relationship like termites.
She sighed heavily and the windscreen steamed up.
Maybe her instincts were right, but she had come to the wrong place.
***
‘Just ask him,’ Jess had said, for about the fourteenth time, pouring Katie another massive gin and tonic.
Katie had stewed for days on that first message.
She and Ryan had been together for five years.
Although they weren’t married—yet, her mother always said, with a smile—their lives were as intertwined as two people’s lives could be.
Joint bank accounts, shared bills, shared rent, shared streaming accounts.
They went to each other’s work Christmas parties, and their families sent each other Christmas cards.
She didn’t want to rock the boat while sitting in it.
Not when she might be wrong. There was a lot to lose if she went around hurling false accusations.
But then one night, a couple of weeks after the deleted message, when Ryan had told her he was doing ‘evening viewings’ once again, the knot in her stomach had got the better of her, and she had finally gone to Jess’s for advice. And gin.
‘I did ask him,’ she insisted to Jess. ‘We were cooking dinner that night, and I asked, as casually as I could, what the weird deleted message was about earlier. He sort of stopped, looked at me funny, and said, did you read it? And I laughed and said, ‘yes, didn’t you want me to?’ She paused to slug some of the fresh gin and tonic Jess had passed her, wincing slightly as an ice cream headache rapidly formed above her right eye.
She rubbed her temple. ‘And he went all strange and then just stood staring into the fridge and said it was a mistake. He had meant it for me, but he had thought he was replying to something I had asked him. I asked him, what exactly, but he was going red and got irritated and said what’s the big deal and then changed the subject. ’
Jess had raised her eyebrows as she sipped her own drink. ‘Ohhh.’
‘Yes, oh,’ Katie said, frowning and studying the bottom of her glass.
‘But… you asked him, and he’s explained it…sort of, so don’t you need to move on? Aren’t relationships built on honesty?’ Jess had asked.
‘Yes,’ Katie had replied, swilling the gin in her glass as she sat cross-legged in an armchair.
‘They are. But not when one of you might have forgotten that part.’ She sighed heavily.
‘My liar-meter is off, Jess. I love him—so I don’t know if I really do believe him or if I just want to believe him,’ she had said, picking at bits of pizza crust lurking in streaks of grease on her plate.
They’d ordered pizza, but Jess insisted on plates.
No one was eating out of the box in her smart living room, no matter the crisis.
‘So, if you aren’t going to ask him straight out if he’s cheating on you,’ Jess had said, curling her narrow frame into her stylish cream sofa across from Katie, ‘what are you going to do? Seems to me you can either believe him about this message being a mix-up and get on with your relationship and put this behind you, or you can decide you don’t trust him, break up with him, and move on with your life. ’
‘Oh ye of little imagination,’ Katie had muttered darkly into her gin.
Jess stared at her. ‘What?’
‘You know, the thing with you, Jess,’ Katie said, picking some cheese off a pizza crust, ‘is you’re just so nice and balanced and so mentally healthy.
I am sure one of those things you just said is absolutely the right way to go.
I could say to myself, Katie, you and Ryan have been together for five years.
Five very happy years. You’ve never had cause to doubt him.
You’re in this for the long haul. Stop letting your wild imagination see things that aren’t there and commit to this man who has been so good to you. ’
Jess was nodding. ‘Katie, based on what you’ve told me, that sounds like the most reasonable course of action. It seems all you’ve got to go on is a message that he’s given you an explanation for,’ Katie huffed and raised her eyebrows, ‘and a feeling that he’s not making time for you.’
Katie inclined her head. ‘Easy for you to say, with all your reasonableness and sensibleness and not being the one in the middle of this. Ness.’
Jess grinned at her and shook her head.
‘So, what then? Are you saying you’ll break up with him?’
‘No!’ Katie wailed. ‘Cos… what if I am wrong? And I’m just a horrible person with a nasty, suspicious mind who goes around sabotaging her own life? For reasons only a highly paid therapist could help me work out.’