“But you wanted to leave her!”
“I did. I wanted to be with you. I just hadn’t factored in a baby.” His face was pink with emotion and he gripped my hand tightly. “Ruby, I have never fathered a child. It’s something I’d always wanted. Longed for. I wanted a baby even more than Emma did. And I loved you. Of course I loved you. You’re wonderful. But I had to make that decision.”
“And you didn’t think you’d bother telling me?” I couldn’t help it. I knew I sounded bitter, but I was bitter. I was still furious with him, not so much for not leaving his wife, but for not telling me. For letting me down. “Why would you treat someone you loved like that?”
“I told you. I wrote to you. I couldn’t call you: We had that rule, remember? I wouldn’t do anything to make things difficult for you at home. And when I got to work after that week away, you weren’t there.”
“Sarah didn’t tell you why I’d gone?”
He shook his head. “I assumed you’d left so that you wouldn’t have to see me.” He looked down and I knew he felt ashamed. “You have to understand, though, why I couldn’t leave home. I couldn’t leave Emma, not if she was pregnant. What sort of man would do that? And when I got home she bundled me into the car and took me away for a week. She said we should leave our phones behind.” He swallowed and I steeled myself for what he’d say. “She said we needed to bond. That we’d been living separate lives. We had. I’d told you that; we talked about it a lot. She said we had to be a family now, that our child came first. I couldn’t call you. She was with me the whole time. And when I got back to work, you’d gone and I knew I deserved that.”
“I was fired,” I said.
“What?”
“I got to work on Monday morning and was told they were terminating my contract.”
“What? Who told you that?”
“Eleanor Jones.”
He nodded, his face pale. “I hadn’t realized she was in on this, too. Jane must have spoken to her before she left work that day. But why didn’t you e-mail me?”
“Are you kidding? You didn’t turn up. You didn’t write. Then when I tried to call you, your phone was switched off. What kind of e-mail did you want, exactly?”
“But I did write!” He sounded so frustrated. “I don’t understand why you didn’t get it.”
“What time did you send it?”
“About six o’clock. I remember looking at the time when I was writing it.”
I thought back. “Tom sent a text from the train before that, and after I replied I turned the sound off on my phone in case he called me. I was so nervous that I knew he’d suspect something if he spoke to me.”
“Does he know your password?”
“No. No, of course not.”
“So he can’t access your e-mail?”
I stopped short. “Oh no. He had my iPad that day. He took it to London, to use on the train. And if you click on Gmail my in-box would open automatically; the username and password are stored there. I don’t use it for anything private. Just shopping, that sort of thing. But he doesn’t use Gmail. Why would he even open it?”
Harry ignored this. We both knew why Tom would be checking my messages. “You have e-mail notifications on your phone, don’t you?”
“Yes, but nothing came through. Just a second, I’m trying to think . . .” I sat quietly, thinking back to the day I’d left Tom. I’d muted my phone, not wanting to be distracted by messages. “I checked my phone while I was waiting for Tom to come home. There were no messages at all.”
“But if he saw it first and deleted it, the notification would disappear off your phone,” Harry said. “What if he read it on the train and deleted it straightaway?”
“But that would mean he knew I was leaving him.”
* * *
• • •
The moment I said it, I knew it was true. Everything fell into place, the way Tom hadn’t shouted at me, hadn’t argued. And hadn’t asked whether I was involved with anyone else.
He knew.
And since I’d left him, everything had gone wrong.
My mind raced as I thought back to the conversation that night. “I wondered why he didn’t ask why I was leaving.”
“Why did he think you were going?”
“I just told him I was unhappy. I was. He knew I was. I’d told him a hundred times.”
“Didn’t he seem surprised?”
I thought back to that day, the way Tom had reacted. “You know, he didn’t. But I thought that was because he knew I was unhappy. And since then he’s been lovely to me. I thought he’d learned a lesson when I left. That he missed me.”
The thing was that I’d been so glad to get out of the house that I hadn’t given his reaction another thought and then, as soon as I got to the hotel, all I could think about was Harry.
But now I remembered seeing the iPad in his briefcase before I left home. It was on show in his bag, like a huge red flag that was waving at me, and I hadn’t understood the significance. He must have loved that.
And then I realized something else. If Tom had been reading my e-mails, he’d know about the jobs I’d applied for. I cringed. He would have seen the contract between the landlord and me; he would know where I lived, where I worked. He’d said nothing.
I looked at Harry. I really wanted to talk to him, to tell him about the things that had happened since I’d left home. I wanted his help. But how could I trust him now?
I believed him when he said he’d e-mailed me. I should have realized he’d do that. And I could understand why he’d stayed with Emma, hard though that was to accept. But ultimately he’d let me down. He wasn’t the man I’d thought he was.
CHAPTER 61
Ruby
The next morning I woke just after six. The early-morning sun was pouring through my windows and the room was already warm. I kept my eyes closed tightly, not ready to face the day. I’d slept heavily and seemed to have stayed in one position all night. My limbs were stiff and aching, but I was too tired to move. I lay on one side and for a moment it felt as though there was a weight on the bed, as though someone was lying behind me, just inches away. In that half sleep I thought of Harry and how I’d slept in his arms that weekend we were in Paris. I’d never slept so well. Now in the dark warmth of my bed I moved just an inch backward, desperate to find him there. As I pushed back I felt something blocking me and my eyes snapped open. I sat up with a lurch. The pillows from the other side of the bed had moved down while I was sleeping and had been pressing against my back.