‘George, do you agree?’
‘Umm. Yes. Absolutely.’
He tries to smile. Tries to pay attention but on each attempt to focus, his thoughts drift back to Leah. Were they too broken to fix? George doesn’t know. He doesn’t know if he wants them to be. In sickness and in health, George had promised, and it wasn’t that he hadn’t meant it, more that he never envisaged there being so much of the sickness. The minute he had opened the parcel yesterday and had seen the array of cleaning products, he knew. He just knew she was slipping backwards and it shamed him to admit that there was a split second when he had stood, rooted to the spot, with the thought that he could run away flickering across his mind. Never come back. Start a new life, one with love and laughter and happiness. But he couldn’t force his legs to move. He had too much to lose, but if he stayed, everything to gain.
‘George?’ The client stabs the last piece of sausage onto his fork with more force than necessary. George knows he’d been asked another question.
‘Sorry. I… My wife is unwell. I think I need to go. Sorry.’ He opens his wallet to throw some cash on the table but it is empty. Instead, he pulls out his credit card, hoping it won’t be refused.
‘It’s okay. I’ll settle up. You get home to your wife.’ The man sitting opposite him softens. George knows he has a family too, but that doesn’t always mean anything, does it? Families can cheat and lie. Betray each other in an instant.
He should know.
The needle on the fuel gauge hovers close to empty. He fills the tank with diesel and remembers he had forgotten to fill Leah’s car when he had promised to. Ashamed he’d let her down again, he picks up some yellow and orange flowers from the reduced-price bucket. The roses in the bouquet are browning and shrivelled but if he plucks them out the other flowers are fresh.
He hasn’t seen Leah since their row yesterday. They had eaten their lunch in silence. Even Archie had been quiet, chewing his crusts without complaint, finishing his carrot sticks before asking for a cookie. George doesn’t want him growing up in an atmosphere – it isn’t fair on anyone. Is having two unhappy parents under the same roof better for a child than being shuttled between argument-free homes? He just doesn’t know. Not that he can afford a second home, he is barely managing the first, sinking all his money into the mortgage on a property that’s not even in his name. That’s unfair, though. Leah didn’t have a mortgage before he’d wanted to set up a business. She’d believed in him enough to take on a job purely so the bank would give them more funds than they could feasibly afford to pay back. It wasn’t irresponsible money-lending but a calculated risk. They have plenty of capital. The house is worth much more than they owe. Even so, he feels the bank is just biding its time. Waiting to snatch their home away.
As he had hugged Archie goodbye before heading out for the evening, he pretended that he was saying goodbye after a weekend visit and leaving his boy for a week, just to see how it felt.
It hurt.
The clock in the hallway had displayed midnight by the time he returned. The tick-tick-tick of its hands seemed to reprimand him.
Liar-liar-liar.
He had hesitated. His foot on the bottom step, his fingers lightly resting on the bannister. He couldn’t climb into bed with his wife, not smelling of another woman’s perfume. Not when the smell would be so familiar to her. Instead, he had spent a restless night on the couch.
George doesn’t call out as he enters the house, he doesn’t quite know what to say. How to sound. The TV is on in the lounge, Archie cross-legged on the floor and glued to Shrek. George frowns. Archie hadn’t seemed unwell when he’d kissed him goodbye early that morning and by the way he is dipping his hand into a bag of Pom Bears, crunching the crisps, he probably isn’t ill. Instead of disturbing him, George wanders into the kitchen, in search of his wife. Leah is sitting at the table, studying something on her laptop.
For a moment George drinks her in. The way her soft hair hangs like a glossy sheet down her back, the sun through the window picking out natural golden highlights among the red. She really is beautiful. A one-of-a-kind gasp-in-surprise when she walks into a room type. Except she isn’t a one-off. Marie is almost identical although she has entirely different hair. An entirely different personality. His sister-in-law intrudes into his thoughts far more frequently than he’d like nowadays.
As George crosses the kitchen he can see Leah is watching the press coverage from her original case on YouTube. He feels a mixture of sadness and anger that their boy is alone in the lounge while Leah has again stepped into the past.
‘Hi.’ George ignores the way she flinches when she became aware of his presence.
He holds out BP garage’s finest peace offering. ‘Are you okay?’ he asks, although she clearly isn’t. Her eyes are bloodshot and red-rimmed as though she’s been crying for hours and he wonders if he’s been the cause of that or if it is something else.
Hurriedly, Leah slams the lid of the laptop down with her gloved hand before opening it again slightly. She repeats this ritual twice more, lightning fast, all the while unable to look George in the eye. It takes seconds and a casual observer might not have noticed, but George feels panic rising.
Threes.
He hadn’t realized she was quite so bad.
Again.
She pushes the computer angrily away. George feels she’s pushing him away. He feels alone, not like last night with arms and legs wrapped around him. Soft breath and warm moans in his ears.
‘Why isn’t Archie at nursery?’ he asks.
‘He’s out’ is all she says flatly and at first George is confused. Archie is out? What does that mean? But then she says, ‘Graham McDonald called to tell me,’ and he realizes why she was watching YouTube.
Watching him.
He’s out.
‘I couldn’t face leaving the house. The thought of him out there.’ She stares out of the window with wide eyes.
‘He was always going to be released sometime,’ George says, but his voice is thin. The memories of what happened last time he was released are still raw. Then he had desperately wanted to save Leah. He knows he should feel the same now. George reaches for his wife but she leans sideways on her stool, away from him. Instead, he crosses to the sink to wash his hands. Afterwards, she allows him to hold her but her body is stiff.
‘We can’t let this affect Archie. You can’t keep him inside forever. He needs to go to nursery. You have to go to work. You can’t let that… that man be the ruin of you. I bet he hasn’t given you a second thought. Any of you. Leah, you can choose to—’
Quickly, she pushes him away. ‘It seems we all have choices to make. I saw Marie yesterday. You’ll never guess what she said?’ Damp patches form in George’s armpits. He doesn’t know what he should say to that, what he could say, and so he says nothing. Has Marie given away their secret? He doesn’t think Leah would have kept quiet about it for twenty-four hours if she had. Infidelity isn’t something his wife would forget to mention. Besides, Marie would have warned him, wouldn’t she?
‘She’s been approached by a journalist.’
‘We’ve all been approached by journalists the past few weeks.’ Even George. He’d felt sick at first as the man in the coffee shop had leered at him as he pushed his card into George’s hand. What’s it really like living with a Sinclair Sister? Does she have trust issues? Issues with men? George knew what he was asking and he had wanted to throw a punch until the man hit him with a figure his paper was prepared to pay. ‘Fucking scum,’ George muttered but he was still staggered at the money on the table.