I could not tear my eyes from Tara’s face.

How could you?

Was he better than me?

Did you love him?

So quickly the mind adjusts to the previously unimaginable.

And then the questions change.

Do you still love me?

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hands, knowing what I wanted to do as soon as my wife came home.

25

Tara

Christian wanted to have sex with me. The sex light was in his eyes, and I guessed the bottle of bubbles was in the fridge and two flutes were in the freezer. More than me, perhaps, my husband craved routine. When I returned home in the early afternoon, he was waiting, all ready for love action, and I could tell he had seen my speech because he had the red-eyed and snotty look of someone who has been crying.

Christian was not a big weeper. He had cried the first time he told me about the death of his parents, and again when Marlon was born, and then when Buddy had pancreatitis and we thought we might lose him. All good reasons. But now he had been crying about me, and he swallowed down some of that leftover grief and he took me in his arms and I huddled into his hard bulk and it felt good, being held. No, it was a bit more than that – being held felt like it was enough for me right now. I felt wrung out by all those strangers staring at me, shouting questions at me, wanting to rip apart my life and feed it into the gormless maws of the great unwashed.

‘This feels nice,’ I said.

‘I miss us,’ he said. ‘I miss when it is just us.’

He found my mouth with his mouth, and that felt good too, but I felt the first flutter of panic because I knew how Christian thought he could start healing our wounds and I was not in the mood for penetration.

‘I haven’t got to pick up Marlon for an hour,’ Christian said and kissed me long and deep, and I kissed him back, but dialling the passion down a notch. ‘Prosecco?’ he said.

And I sighed. Sorry, I just couldn’t help it.

‘Don’t you ever get a wee bit tired of Prosecco, Christian?’

He pulled away, clearly offended, and then all at once it broke without warning, the storm that had to break, the row that had been coming for us, the argument that we could not avoid, and I saw that the afternoon sex would only have been a way to defer the confrontation, it would have been one last pretence that we were the same, that we were unbreakable, and unbroken, and it just was not true, no matter how much we both wanted it to be.

I turned away and he seized my wrist.

‘You loved him, didn’t you? Why don’t you just say it?’

‘Christ. We had this conversation already, didn’t we? I love you.’