When Cass fell asleep, Ali lay awake for a long time, feeling maudlin, far too unhappy to switch off, but it wasn’t Beatriz on her mind, it was that other loss, far greater and more devastating, entirely self-inflicted. When she’d chosen Michael over Dan in that terrible confrontation, she’d told herself afterwards that she’d made a courageous decision, and a selfless, generous one, essentially to preserve the equilibrium of their daughters’ lives, and to spare all of them from crisis. But she’d been wrong, she understood that now: badly, epically wrong. She’d been shown a bold, brilliant alternative future for herself, and then rejected it. She lay on the king-sized bed beside a softly snoring Cass, and she wept self-pitying tears for the loss of the life she might have had with Daniel, who, in the melodrama of her grief, she felt was her heart’s home, her magnetic north, the darling of her soul. It was only later, when she woke from a fitful few hours’ sleep, that she thought, OK, Ali, so quit whingeing and do something.

27

EDINBURGH,
19 JULY 2013

For months after he told her, Katelin’s pain raged like fire or flood through every facet of their lives. The house was infected by sadness; it clotted the air they breathed so that sometimes he had to walk outside into the night to fill his lungs with unsullied oxygen. Dan’s infidelity had twisted and warped their past and their future as well as their present and briefly, in those first terrible days, Katelin became unrecognisable: savage, vengeful, obsessive. She wanted every single detail of his affair, every single secret, because until she knew exactly – exactly – what Ali Connor knew, she couldn’t rest. She rang him on the train to ask him what she was wearing when they met in Adelaide, and then again, immediately afterwards, to ask what she wore in bed. What, she demanded, did Ali Connor have that was so irresistible he’d risked everything by fucking her? He couldn’t answer truthfully, so he tried saying, ‘Nothing, she has nothing irresistible, I was a fool,’ and the words were meaningless to them both. She woke him in the night with questions about sex – how often, when, how – and when Dan refused to respond, off they would go on a different tack, new questions coming at him like bullets from a Gatling gun. Other times, Dan would be startled from sleep by the depth of the silence and find her awake beside him, staring at the ceiling with dry wide eyes. At these times, she seemed stronger: resilient, independent, rejecting his offered love in favour of her own inner resources. But they were skin deep, and barely that: her pain was just under the surface, and it stayed there for many weeks, unpredictable, undiminished, unstoppable.