She exploded. ‘The man’s been murdered, for Christ’s sake! We have to tell the police now! We have to tell the hotel now!’

‘Yes, but first let me explain. Just let me tell Christian. I don’t want him—’

Ginger was crying with rage.

‘No!’ she shouted, shoving me away as she punched in 999. ‘No, Tara, no. I’m sorry. But just no.’

She was already speaking to the operator as I ran for home.

15

Tara

Christian was still getting ready to put Marlon to bed when I burst through the front door. It was way past Marlon’s bedtime, even for a Saturday night, even for a day when he had shed a lot of tears and needed some cheering up, and the pair of them were immediately on me, smothering me in kisses, and I felt sure they would see that I was soaked in the sweat of panic and dread. But they did not notice and I envied them their overexcited, ready-for-bed innocence, and their open-hearted smiles, and their good lives. Buddy scrambled up my legs with the Labrador’s simple and eternal message:

I love you, I love you, I love you!

Their welcoming faces, the simple decency, their unquestioning trust – it all broke my heart.

‘Say it,’ Marlon ordered. ‘Say our special words!’

I placed my index finger in the dimple of his chubby cheek.

My hand was trembling and nobody noticed. Marlon and Christian grinned with happy anticipation.

‘I’m going to kiss you right there,’ I said, my voice trembling, sounding strange to me, like the voice of someone else, someone I did not know, someone I had never expected to be. I looked at my husband and I could not believe that he could not see it all in my face, the whole sorry mess, the terrible truth.

‘Christian?’ I said quietly.

‘Be right back,’ he said. ‘Put a couple of glasses in the freezer, would you? It feels like a Prosecco night. We’ve all had a rough day.’

I sank into the sofa as the three of them – husband, son and dog – went off to brush teeth and put on pyjamas and get ready for a bedtime story.

Christian’s phone had been left on the coffee table and I stared at it dumbfounded, knowing that I could never leave my phone lying about like that. Not any more. Never again.

I picked it up and began scrolling through his text messages and email and WhatsApp, looking at his life, searching for the secrets that he kept.

Shopping for pain. That’s what I was doing. Because I deserved some pain tonight. I deserved a lot of pain.

But Christian’s life was good. And he kept no secrets from me.

And soon, punch-drunk with exhaustion, soon I was losing myself in his Instagram account and in the happy images of our family, and all the spectacular sunrises he had loved, and the skateboarding, squashed-faced French bulldogs that made him smile, and the Fender Telecaster guitars he craved. And I could have begun sobbing and never stopped for all that I had so stupidly thrown away.