The Husband’s Secret

‘but Felicity and I have fallen in love.’
    ‘Very funny.’ Tess grouped the coffee cups together and smiled. ‘Hilarious.’
    But it seemed it wasn’t a joke.
    Now she put her hands on the honey-gold pine of the table and stared at them. Her pale, blue-veined, knuckly hands. An ex-boyfriend, she couldn’t remember which, had once told her that he was in love with her hands. Will had had a lot of trouble getting the ring over her knuckle at their wedding. Their guests had laughed softly. Will had pretended to exhale with relief once he got it on, while he secretly caressed her hand.
    Tess looked up and saw Will and Felicity exchange covert worried glances.
    ‘So it’s true love, is it?’ said Tess. ‘You’re soul mates, are you?’
    A nerve throbbed in Will’s cheek. Felicity tugged at her hair.
    Yes. That’s what they were both thinking. Yes, it is true love. Yes, we are soul mates.
    ‘When exactly did this start?’ she asked. ‘When did these “feelings” between you develop?’
    ‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Will hurriedly.
    ‘It matters to me! ’ Tess’s voice rose.
    ‘I guess, I’m not sure, maybe about six months ago?’ mumbled Felicity, looking at the table.
    ‘So when you started to lose weight?’ said Tess.
    Felicity shrugged.
    Tess said to Will, ‘Funny that you never looked twice at her when she was fat.’
    The bitter taste of nastiness flooded her mouth. How long since she’d let herself say something so cruel? Not since she was a teenager.
    She had never called Felicity fat. Never said a critical word about her weight.
    ‘Tess, please –’ said Will without any censure in his voice, just a soft, desperate pleading.
    ‘It’s fine,’ said Felicity. ‘I deserve it. We deserve it.’ She lifted her chin and looked at Tess with naked, brave humility.
    So Tess was going to be allowed to kick and scratch as much as she wanted. They were just going to sit there and take it for as long as it took. They weren’t going to fight back. Will and Felicity were fundamentally good. She knew this. They were good people and that’s why they were going to be so nice about this, so understanding and accepting of Tess’s rage, so that in the end Tess would be the bad person, not them. They hadn’t actually slept together, they hadn’t betrayed her. They’dfallen in love! It wasn’t an ordinary grubby little affair. It was fate. Predestined. Nobody could think that badly of them.
    It was genius.
    ‘Why didn’t you tell me on your own?’ Tess tried to lock eyes with Will, as if the strength of her gaze could bring him back from wherever he’d gone. His eyes, his strange hazel eyes, the colour of beaten copper, with thick black eyelashes, eyes that were so different from Tess’s own run-of-the-mill pale blue ones, the eyes that her son had inherited and Tess thought of as somehow belonging to her now, a beloved possession for which she gracefully accepted compliments – ‘Your son has lovely eyes.’ ‘He gets them from my husband. Nothing to do with me.’ But everything to do with her. Hers. They were hers . Will’s gold eyes were normally amused, he was always ready to laugh at the world, he found day-to-day life generally pretty funny, it was one of the things she loved about him most, but right now they were looking at her imploringly, the way Liam looked at her when he wanted something at the supermarket.
    Please Mum, I want that sugary treat with all the preservatives and the cleverly branded packaging and I know I promised I wouldn’t ask for anything but I want it.
    Please Tess, I want your delicious-looking cousin and I know I promised to be true to you in good times and bad, in sickness and health, but pleeeease.
    No. You may not have her. I said no.
    ‘We couldn’t work out the right time or the right place,’ said Will. ‘And we both wanted to tell you. We couldn’t – and then we just thought, we couldn’t go any longer without you knowing – so we just . . .’ His jaw shifted, turkey-like, in and out, back and forth. ‘We thought there would never be a good time for a conversation like this.’
    We. They were a ‘we’. They’d talked about this. Without her. Well, of course they’d talked without her. They’d ‘fallen in love’ without her.
    ‘I thought I should be here too,’ said Felicity.
    ‘Did you now?’ said Tess. She couldn’t bear to look at Felicity. ‘So what happens next?’
    Asking the question filled her with a fresh