The Husband’s Secret

too good at netball, so Felicity was left behind; next thing, you’ve suddenly lost interest in netball. You get a career in advertising. What a surprise! Felicity gets a career in advertising.’
    ‘Oh, Mum,’ said Tess. ‘I don’t know. You make it sound so calculated. We just liked doing the same things. Anyway, Felicity is a graphic designer! I was an advertising manager. They’re quite different.’
    But not to her mother, who pursed her lips as if she knew better, before draining the rest of her brandy. ‘Look, I’m not saying she did it deliberately. But she suffocated you! When you were born, I remember thanking God that you weren’t a twin, that you’d be able to live your life on your own terms, without all that comparing and competing. And then, somehow, you and Felicity end up just like Mary and me, like twins! Worse than twins! I wondered what sort of person you might have become if you hadn’t had her breathing down your neck all the time, what friends you might have made –’
    ‘ Friends ? I wouldn’t have made any other friends! I was too shy! I was so shy I was practically disabled. I’m still sort of socially weird.’ She had stopped short of telling her mother about her self-diagnosis.
    ‘Felicity kept you shy,’ her mother had said. ‘It suited her. You weren’t really that shy.’
    Now Tess wriggled her neck against her pillow. It was too hard; she missed her own pillow at home in Melbourne. Was what her mother said true? Had she spent most of her life in a dysfunctional relationship with her cousin?
    She thought of that awful, strange hot summer when her parents’ marriage ended. It was like remembering a long illness. She’d had no inkling. Sure, her parents aggravated each other. They were so different. But they were her mum and dad. Everyone she knew had a mum and a dad who lived in the same house. Her circle of friends and family was too small and suburban and Catholic. She knew the word ‘divorce’ but it was like the word ‘earthquake’. It wasn’t something that would ever happen to her. But five minutes after her parents made their strange, stilted little announcement, her father packed his clothes into the suitcase they took on holidays, and went to stay in a musty-smelling furnished flat full of spindly, old-lady furniture, and her mother wore the same old shapeless dress for eight days in a row and walked about the house laughing, crying and muttering, ‘Good riddance, mate.’ Tess was ten. It was Felicity who got Tess through that summer, who took her to the local pool and lay side by side with her on the concrete in the burning sun (and Felicity, with her beautiful white skin, hated sunbaking) for as long as Tess wanted, who spent her own money on a Greatest Hits record just to make Tess feel better, who brought her bowls of ice cream with chocolate topping each time she sat on the couch and cried.
    It was Felicity Tess called when she lost her virginity, when she lost her first job, when she was dumped for the firsttime, when Will said ‘I love you’, when she and Will had their first proper fight, when he proposed, when her waters broke, when Liam took his first steps.
    They’d shared everything throughout their lives. Toys. Bikes. Their first doll’s house. (It stayed at their grandmother’s house.) Their first car. Their first apartments. Their first overseas holiday. Tess’s husband.
    She’d let Felicity share Will . Of course she had. She’d let Felicity be like a mother to Liam, and she’d let Felicity be like a wife to Will. She’d shared her whole life with her. Because Felicity was obviously too fat to find her own husband and her own life. Was that what Tess had been subconsciously thinking? Or because she thought Felicity was too fat to even need her own life?
    And then Felicity got greedy. She wanted all of Will.
    If it had been any other woman but Felicity, Tess would never had said, ‘Have your affair and give my husband back.’ It wouldn’t have been conceivable. But because it was Felicity it was . . . okay? Forgivable? Is that what she meant? She’d share a toothbrush with Felicity, so she’d also let her use her husband? But at the same time, it also made the betrayal worse. A million times worse.
    She rolled onto her stomach and pressed her face into the pillow. Her feelings about Felicity were irrelevant. She needed to think about Liam. (‘What about me ?’ her ten-year-old self had kept thinking when her parents