Chapter 1 #2
Katie’s hand holding her glass shook, and she put her glass down heavily on the coffee table.
She knew without looking that Jess would wince at that, her pristine home almost an extension of herself.
‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, her hands feeling sweaty and unsteady.
She placed her palms on her knees, trying to steady herself, but there was a growing lump in her throat.
She swallowed hard, but it wouldn’t budge.
Her stomach was roiling, twisting itself into knots.
‘I just feel so…’ her mouth was dry now, the words thick on her tongue, ‘lost. And the person I would normally turn to when I feel like this is the one person I don’t know if I can trust… .’
She lost the battle against the tears. Snivelling loudly and swiping at her face with her sleeve, she watched as Jess spun the cap off the gin and topped up both glasses.
‘What now then?’ Jess asked, her face a mask of concern as she slid a coaster under Katie’s glass. ‘Are you going to wait and see? It’s really only this message that’s got you worried, isn’t it? It’s not like he hasn’t done evening viewings before. Maybe things will settle down now.’
Katie was shaking her head as she grabbed the glass and took a swig.
‘No,’ she said, with greater determination than she felt.
She sniffed as Jess passed her a box of tissues, and she grabbed a handful.
‘I am going to find out what is going on. If it’s all in my head, I will know soon enough and I can let it go and my perfectly lovely life can carry on as it was. If there is something to it, I will find out and I can...’ She hesitated, unsure what came next. ‘I can….’
Big, fat tears sprung up again and rolled down her cheeks. ‘Jess…’ she felt short of breath. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if I’m right!’
She balled the tissues into a soggy pad in her hand and clutched at the stem of her glass. Her whole body was vibrating with the force of her shaking.
Jess was across the room in two quick strides. She perched on the arm of the chair beside Katie. Taking the gin glass from Katie, Jess placed it carefully on the coaster before wrapping her arms around her friend. Katie reached up and grabbed Jess’s arms.
‘My dearest Katie,’ she said into the top of her head, and Katie felt Jess’s soft hands smoothing down her hair. ‘I’m here for you.’ She squeezed her. ‘Whatever happens, I’m here for you. You know that, don’t you?’
She shook Katie gently.
Katie, who felt like a soggy, heaving, crying pile of a person-shaped thing, snivelled. ‘Yes.’
Jess handed her a wad of clean tissues.
‘Remember in secondary school when you fell over getting off the school bus, and that little shit Kevin Dollard told all the boys he saw up your skirt, and you weren’t wearing any pants?’
Katie, hunched over, chin pressed into her chest, Jess’s arms holding her, snorted. ‘Humph, yes.’
‘Didn’t I shove him off the wall the next day and kick him in the shins and tell him to fuck off and stop telling lies?’
‘Yes.’ Katie lifted her eyes to her friend’s, blinking Jess’s face into focus. ‘Are you going to shove Ryan off a wall and kick him in the shins?’
Jess grinned. ‘I’ll do whatever you need me to.
But I think that’s plan B. I am sure there are options before we get to that point.
After all, I’m a teacher now—I can’t go shoving people off walls anymore.
Not unless they’ve really upset you anyway.
And we don’t know yet that Ryan has done anything that warrants being shoved off a wall. ’
‘Hmm. Well,’ Katie mumbled into her clean tissues. ‘That’s what I am going to find out.’
Jess leaned back from Katie, tipped her head to one side, and said, ‘What do you mean, find out? You’re not going to spy on him, are you?’ She frowned. ‘Katie, that doesn’t sound healthy.’
Jess stood, hands on her hips.
‘Ugh, do I look healthy to you?’ Katie said, spreading her arms wide.
Jess ambled back towards her seat on the sofa.
‘What about this mess,’ Katie gestured to her mascara-streaked face and tear-soaked t-shirt, ‘screams has her shit together? I am not going to spy on him.’ She pulled a face at Jess. ‘As you put it.’ She paused and wiped her hair away from her eyes. ‘I am going to conduct a reconnaissance mission.’
Jess frowned and pressed a hand to her forehead, looking entirely unconvinced.
‘Katie, that sounds like spying by another name. A much longer name that sounds only slightly less devious.’ Jess leaned across the coffee table, her voice low and slow.
‘Katie, I think we need to pause and reflect here. Surely—’
‘No,’ Katie said, jumping to her feet. ‘I’ve been in pause and reflect mode for weeks now. Something is off. I know it. And I have asked him about it,’ she said, pacing now, stomping up and down in her socked feet on Jess’s neat oat-coloured carpet in her neat cream living room.
‘There was that first deleted message, which he tried to laugh off and pretend it was for me, but he’d deleted it accidentally, but he looked very shifty,’ she waggled her finger, ‘when I asked him about it. Then he changed the subject. Then he has been busy with work more recently. Said he has more evening viewings. Told me that, with the way the housing market is, he has to put his best foot forward, or he won’t get his commission.
I thought about calling the office and asking when his evening viewings were, but Stephanie, the receptionist, was bound to tell him I called.
Then he’ll ask me why I’m checking on him, and then he’ll lie.
If it’s a lie. Maybe it’s not a lie. Maybe he really does have evening viewings. ’
Her shoulders sagged for a moment as doubt and confusion ran through her.
She was exhausted. She had never known such intrusive thoughts.
She knew that, on paper, it seemed like nothing.
One misunderstood text message. Some extra evening work, which wasn’t entirely unusual for an estate agent.
But she couldn’t shake the pervasive feeling of unease.
One tiny seed had been gusted into the manicured garden of her relationship, and now the place was overrun with weeds.
Her instincts were telling her something was wrong. She couldn’t ignore them.
She pulled herself upright, shoulders back, head high.
‘I am taking matters into my own hands—’
‘Uh oh.’
‘And I am going to follow him—’
‘So you are spying on him—’
‘To check on his whereabouts to see if I am a horrible, suspicious cow,’ her lower lip wobbled, and she took a breath, ‘or a wronged woman.’
Jess’s mouth twitched. ‘A wronged woman? Have you been reading Victorian romances again?’
Katie ignored her. ‘I’m doing this, Jess,’ she said, standing tall now beside the coffee table in socked feet. She reached for her gin. ‘I’ve bought a wig and—’
Jess snorted and covered her mouth. ‘Jesus, Katie! Do you need to go that far?’
‘I need to spy,’ she checked herself. ‘I mean, observe him, without being noticed.’ Katie grabbed a fistful of her unruly red hair. ‘This doesn’t blend in well. And some fake glasses.’
‘Christ, Katie, are you going to get a trench coat and a pipe as well?’
‘Don’t mock me!’ She glared at her friend. ‘I’m deadly serious.’
Jess’s face was pained. ‘That’s what’s worrying me,’ she muttered.
‘But I do have an old overcoat that I never wear that Ryan wouldn’t recognise…’
Jess sighed and smoothed a hand over her neatly coiffed bob. ‘Katie, this is hardly what someone in their right mind would do.’
‘I know.’ Katie nodded. ‘Which is perhaps why it seems like a perfectly logical course of action to me at this time. So there’s just one final thing…’
Jess looked at her sideways.
Katie aimed for a voice that was at once calm and yet pleading. ‘Can I borrow your car, please? He’ll recognise mine.’
Over the rest of that evening, Jess had eventually persuaded Katie into a sort of holding pattern.
They agreed to no stalking, spying, or reconnaissance unless and until there was something else to cause suspicion, such as another strange message or no end to the evening work and still nothing to show for it.
After all, Jess reasoned, the man might well be out there slaving away all these hours, and he didn’t deserve her character assassination.
Katie had insisted on keeping the wig and glasses, but after two more gins, one good cry, and half a dozen chocolate biscuits, even Katie agreed she had a very active imagination and had probably made a mountain out of a molehill.
And so things had settled down for a week or so.
Katie had shaken off her lingering doubts, buried the wig and glasses at the back of her wardrobe and life went on much as it had for several years now.
Ryan was up first, out to the gym five mornings out of seven, while Katie lingered in the warm bed.
She would drift back to sleep after he left, only to wake to the noise of the blender as Ryan made his daily protein shake.
She never needed to set the alarm, as Ryan’s protein needs woke her up every day.
Ryan’s nickname for her was Special K. She liked it only because it was their thing and only Ryan called her by it, not because it was a great nickname.
He would come into the bedroom, abandon his near-empty glass on the bedside table, give her a sweaty kiss and say, ‘rise and shine Special K!’ Then he’d jump into the shower, the congealed remains of the protein shake sitting next to her, lumpy brown liquid slowly sliding down the glass.
But recently, the sweaty kisses and Special Ks had become a little more intermittent.
Katie would prise herself out of bed and pick out an outfit for the day.
She worked from home but still enjoyed getting a little dressed up for video calls.
Besides, what if she needed to pop out at lunchtime?
Better to run down to the supermarket in her turquoise wrap dress and sequin trainers than in sagging grey jogging bottoms. She would be downstairs sipping coffee by the time Ryan reappeared, and she would smell him coming before she saw him.
Ryan liberally doused himself in the same aftershave he had been wearing for years, before they had even met. Katie still remembered how good he smelled the night they met at a house party Ryan and his housemates had thrown.
They were both only a few years out of university.
The vibe of the house party was very student-ish—an old three-piece suite covered in cheap tie-dye throws, bare light bulbs in the ceiling lights, dusty salt lamps tucked in the corners, and dog-eared movie posters pinned to the walls for decoration.
The house, occupied by five guys in their mid-20s, had an underlying smell of sweat and weed.
The other lads in the house were mooching about in dangerously low-slung jeans and t-shirts that were ripped and faded and cost fifty quid to buy.
Ryan was different. He was wearing chinos and a carefully ironed shirt.
He seemed to be trying to host the party—welcoming people as they arrived, showing them where to go—rather than just leaving the front door open and retreating to the kitchen to sit round the kitchen table and smoke like the other housemates.
Katie, who was there with a friend who knew one of the other housemates, paused as they entered to ask Ryan where the fridge was, lifting a hand holding a cheap bottle of wine. And that was it.
They had sat and talked all night, while the party came and went around them, until the morning sun leaked through the smeary windows. Over the years, they would tell people warm wine was how they met.
Ryan was entertaining, ambitious, had a good job, and was nearly ready to get his own place. And whenever Ryan moved, or leaned in to speak into her ear above the music, she breathed in a lungful of that aftershave.
All these years later, Katie was sure he was so used to the scent he could no longer smell his own aftershave, so he gradually applied more and more as time went on. Their house smelled of him all day, hours after he had left. She liked it; it felt like he was always there.
But that morning, as Ryan grabbed his briefcase and car keys and then swung back to her for a kiss goodbye, he had pressed his lips to hers and murmured, ‘Bye Mel, see you later.’