The Husband’s Secret

then perhaps Will wouldn’t have fallen in love with Felicity. Or at least he would have had a wider range of potential mistresses at his disposal.
    When her life fell apart there wasn’t one friend Tess could call. Not one friend. That’s why she was behaving like this with Connor. She needed a friend .
    ‘I fit the pattern, don’t I?’ said Tess suddenly. ‘You keep choosing the wrong women. I’m another wrong woman.’
    ‘Mmmm,’ said Connor. ‘Also, you didn’t even bring the hot cross buns you promised.’
    He tipped back his paper cup and drained the last of his hot chocolate. He put it down on the ledge next to him and shifted closer to her.
    ‘I’m using you,’ said Tess. ‘I’m a bad person.’
    He put one warm hand on the back of her neck and pulled her close enough so she could smell the chocolate on his breath. He took the paper cup from her unresisting hand.
    ‘I’m using you to help me not think about my husband,’ she clarified. She wanted him to understand.
    ‘Tess. Honey. Do you think I don’t know that?’ Then he kissed her so deeply and so completely that she felt like she was falling, floating, spiralling down, down, down, like Alice in Wonderland.

6 April 1984
    Janie didn’t know that boys could blush. Her brother Rob blushed, but obviously he didn’t count as a proper boy. She didn’t know that a smart, good-looking, private-school boy like John-Paul Fitzpatrick could blush. It was late in the afternoon, and the light was changing, making everything indistinct and shadowy, but still she could see that John-Paul’s face was glowing. Even his ears, she noticed, were a translucent pink.
    She’d just said her little speech about how there was this ‘other guy’ she’d been seeing and he wanted her to be his ‘sort of, um, girlfriend’. So she really couldn’t see John-Paul any more, because the other guy wanted to ‘make things sort of official’.
    She’d had this vague idea that it would be better to make it sound as if it were Connor’s fault, as if he was making her break up with John-Paul, but now, as John-Paul’s face reddened, she wondered if it had been a mistake to mention another boy at all. She could have blamed it on her father. She could have said that she was too nervous about him finding out that she was seeing a boy.
    But part of her had wanted John-Paul to know that she was in demand.
    ‘But Janie,’ John-Paul’s voice sounded girly and squeaky, as if he was about to cry. ‘I thought you were my girlfriend.’
    Janie was horrified. Her own face flushed in sympathy and she looked away towards the swings and heard herself giggle. A strange, high-pitched giggle. It was a bad habit she had, of laughing when she was nervous, when she didn’t find anything at all funny about a situation. It had happened, for example, when Janie was thirteen and the school principal had come into their homeroom with such a sombre, mournful expression on his normally jolly face and told them that their geography teacher’s husband had died. Janie had been so shocked and distressed, and then she’d laughed. It was inexplicable. The whole class had turned to look at her accusingly and she’d just about died of shame.
    John-Paul lunged at her. Her first fleeting thought was that he was going to kiss her, and this was his odd yet masterful technique, and she was pleased and excited. He wasn’t going to let her break up with him. He wasn’t going to stand for it!
    But then his hands grabbed her neck . She tried to say, ‘That’s hurting, John-Paul,’ but she couldn’t speak, and she wanted to clear up this dreadful misunderstanding, to explain that she actually liked him more than Connor, and she’d never meant to hurt his feelings, and she wanted to be his girlfriend, and she tried to convey that with her eyes, which were staring straight into his, his beautiful eyes, and she thought for a second that she saw a shift, a shocked recognition and she felt a loosening of hands, but there was something else happening; something very wrong and unfamiliar was happening to her body, and in that instant a far-off part of her mind remembered that her mother had been going to pick her up from school today to take her to a doctor’s appointment, and she’d forgotten all about itand gone to Connor’s house instead. Her mother would be ropable.
    Her last properly articulated thought was: Oh, shit .
    After that there were no more thoughts, just helpless, flailing