‘That was the right thing to say. Was there a second one?’

‘A second what?’ He pressed one hand over my breast and the other over my throat, tilting me flat again.

‘Wife.’

‘The divorce of the first only came through at the start of this year, so not yet.’ His mouth was against mine. ‘The grounds were desertion. She left me.’

‘When?’

‘Three years ago.’

I thought, but didn’t say, that three years ago wasn’t a great time for me either, with Maxine and that glass table and the line I was stupidly ready to cross.

‘What’s her name?’

‘Jane.’ Zac went on. ‘The end of that marriage – it’s the worst thing that ever happened to me. If you know that now, it will help you to understand.’

‘Understand what?’

‘Understand me. The way I am. The care I take, now, to cherish what I value, to make sure I don’t lose it.’

‘The way you are is perfect.’ I pulled him on top of me.

He laughed. ‘That was the right thing to say too. And to do.’

‘Except for the arrogance thing and the god complex thing.’

‘That not so much.’

‘I find it hard to imagine any woman wanting to leave you.’

‘Good recovery. Smoothly done.’ He kissed me into forgetting about his first wife. When I next opened his bedside drawer, the photograph was gone.

Now
The Girl with the Two-Coloured Eye

Three years later

Bath, Monday, 1 April 2019

I am at work, based now in the paediatric unit of a hospital in Bath. This place is so different from my old job in Cornwall. I am concentrating hard on inputting patient details, when the sound of a crying child makes my attention waver.

A woman is in a deep knee bend beside a pushchair, fumbling with one manicured hand to pick up a stuffed kitty that the child must have thrown. One of those women who spends her morning in designer activewear, then transforms into a lady who lunches. Her expensively jewelled fingers are tipped with blue-black manicured nails that for most mothers would not be compatible with a toddler. Those fingers curl around a takeaway coffee cup that she is struggling not to spill.

The child’s small hand shoots out to grab the edge of the woman’s techno-fabric sleeve. Trying to protect the child from the hot drink, the woman loses her balance and falls. The cup lands beside her, the lid pops off, and the steaming coffee splashes onto the linoleum as well as the woman’s blossom-print leggings. The child stops screaming, arrested by the spectacle of her mother on the floor.

‘Can’t she read?’ Trudy, who is the ward manager’s assistant and senior to me, is hissing from behind her computer screen. ‘Tell her. Get out there now, Helen, and tell her about the sign.’

‘Isn’t it a bit late for that?’

‘Go,’ Trudy says.