I had still not found any trace of your wife’s name, not even in news reports, of which there weren’t many. I’d spent the journey home crying or looking it up on my phone, heedless of the danger. Mrs Sullivan. Patrick Sullivan wife. Crash death widow. But there was nothing. She may as well have been a ghost.

Nora

Nora

Suzi poured the whole thing out to me, sitting at my table, weeping into her hands. The noise she made was halfway between a scream and a bellow, anger and loss and shock all boiling up in her. I patted her shoulders, offered tea that grew cold without her touching it. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘Oh Nora. I just – I can’t believe it. I thought he’d gone. He’d dumped me.’ I almost asked if you could call it dumped when you were having an affair, but I didn’t. She didn’t need any judgement right now, and since I had seen her and Nick together, the way he spoke to her, I wasn’t surprised that she would look elsewhere.

She told me everything – how they’d met at a conference, well, different conferences in the same hotel, how he’d emailed her the following week and asked her to lunch, the various lies she’d told herself in order to go forward step by step, like advancing into the sea until the water is around your neck. Then today – learning he’d told her the wrong name, that he wasn’t even a doctor. I could almost have sympathised, under different circumstances. I knew how it was to be lied to.

‘I never meant for it to happen,’ she said dully. She was clutching a mass of tissues in her fist, staring at the floor. Every so often her shoulders would heave. ‘I just – I’m so lonely down here. And then he was so – and it just happened.’

It just happened.

I never meant for it to happen.

The same things everyone says at these moments. As if an affair was a lightning strike, a burst tyre, a heart attack. Something that could not be predicted or avoided, rather than two people making a choice to do it, act on it. Maybe she was right. I didn’t know.

‘I was so drunk. And Nick – well, you see how we are.’ Fresh tears rose in her eyes. ‘Nora, I just – I don’t know what happened to us. He never touches me, only my belly. Only the baby matters to him. Sometimes when I think about him, about my life, I can’t believe it’s happening to me. Like if it was someone else I knew, I’d tell them to run. I’d be googling divorce lawyers.’

My mind was whirring, calculating how this changed my plans, now Suzi knew he was dead. What I should do next. ‘Is that what I should tell you?’