Chapters (60)
- Cover
- Books by Sheryl Browne
- Dedication
- KARLA
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Forty-Eight
- Epilogue
- The Affair
- Hear more from Sheryl
- Books by Sheryl Browne
- A Letter from Sheryl
- The Babysitter
- The Second Wife
- Acknowledgements
‘You’re referring to this, I assume?’ He nods down at the stain on the carpet. ‘I lost my temper,’ he admits, causing my chest to constrict. ‘After she’d left.’ Breathing in hard, he indicates the tall free-standing mirror. ‘Fucking gutter press,’ he utters. ‘She wouldn’t have gone if not for them.’
My gaze shoots towards the mirror. In the shattered glass I see several fractured images of my father. I turn my gaze back to him as he raises the hand that holds the brush. It’s bleeding, my stultified mind registers. He has a bandage wrapped haphazardly around it, soggy and wet with a mixture of water and blood.
He smashed the mirror. In his anger and frustration, he lashed out and punched it. This makes sense. This is something my father would do. Giddy with relief, I close my eyes, suck air deep into my lungs and start breathing again. Still, though, through the clearing fog in my head, the ceaseless voice resonates. Liar.
Forty-Four
KARLA
I have no one to call. No one I can talk to. No one left in my life who wants me. I don’t know, any more, whether I was responsible for driving Jason away or whether he would have gone anyway. But should I have done nothing? Just watched him go? Allowed him to destroy my life? Our children’s?
It’s you who’s destroying their lives. Sarah pipes up. That’s why he’s stealing them.
They don’t want me. I ignore her persistent voice in my head and continue on into the nightclub, where I will be able to block all of this out. The low thud of the bass coming through the huge sound system reverberates through my chest cavity as soon as I enter. An aphrodisiac, resonating through my entire body and down my spine, it heightens my senses. At one time, back when I was single and carefree, the music would have whetted my desire – not to sleep with the first reasonable-looking man I saw, but to live, to love, to experience all that life had to offer. Now, it allows me to disappear.
It’s an art I have perfected. When I was at acting school, I seized on one golden rule that we were told we needed to follow in order to succeed: to beware of personal issues, which would be highly corrosive to our creativity. Personal issues shouldn’t creep into any rehearsal or casting, we were instructed as eager new students. I got that. When a personal issue took over, you were no longer telling the character’s story. ‘Introducing personal issues into a scene will take you out of the moment,’ our tutor informed us. ‘We need to cast them aside.’