Everyone did it – he was so good at his job, so willing to help, always ready with a smile and a chat. A delight to be around, really.
So when she was considering upping sticks and moving, she wondered out loud if he’d want to come. It was a whim, initially – she never really thought he’d take her up on it. She knew from their chats that he was a man on the move, that he had a restless air, as though he was running from something, or running to something. But still – she’d been surprised when he thought it over and said yes. She suspected he needed a project to help his wounds to heal as well.
Adrian hadn’t been as keen on the addition to the team. He obviously sensed a rival in this handsome young chap who everyone liked so much. Adrian only reluctantly agreed because she insisted, and because she still had the high moral ground. And because Joe would be, he knew, cheap labour in the months ahead.
Adrian was a dick, but at least he’d allowed her that, which was possibly the luckiest thing that had ever happened to her.
They’d not been in Wexford that long when Adrian’s promises to be a better husband, a better dad, a better man, disintegrated into the air like cobwebs on the breeze.
He started up with a local girl who worked at the building supplies depot. Barely out of her teens, still at the age where she thought romcoms were real and everyone got a happy ending. Presumably they flirted over cement mixers and sandbags, made eyes at each other across a crowded timber yard.
When Geraldine found out – when she saw a love heart and kisses scrawled on a till receipt for three tonnes of topsoil – she wasn’t even angry. She’d done enough crying and yelling for a lifetime the first time around. Anyway, Adrian was good at arguments – he had a way of not only winning them, but somehow leaving her with the feeling that everything was her fault.
This time, she wanted things to be different. She wanted to stay calm and in control. So she’d confirmed her suspicions by turning up at the yard with a toddler in tow, on the pretence of needing a new nail gun, watching Siobhan behind the counter squirm and blush as she served her.
She’d returned home that afternoon with a new nail gun, and a new determination to escape this life she’d become trapped in before it was too late.
When she’d told Joe – because he deserved to know, after they’d brought him out here – he’d been furious. She still remembers it vividly: he’d been outside, working, wearing a scraggy old T-shirt from some place called Affleck’s Palace and paint-spattered steel-toed boots, not seeming to feel the bitter cold that was seeping from the earth.
He listened, and he asked questions, and then he looked ready to track Adrian down and use the nail gun on him. When she’d said that’s not what she wanted, he’d just looked so sad. So confused.
‘I don’t understand him,’ he’d said quietly, looking off to the distant grey sea. ‘I don’t understand how he could have so much, and throw it all away. He has a beautiful wife and a beautiful child, and that’s more than most men could ever wish for.’
‘You can’t understand because you’re not him,’ she’d replied, finding herself strangely wanting to comfort him even though it was her life in shreds.
‘No, and I’m glad. So – tell me what you need me to do. Tell me how I can help,’ he’d responded.
That was just over a year ago, and since then, he’d done exactly that – he’d helped. She told Adrian she wanted out, and after the dramatic fake hysteria that she’d expected, he’d agreed. She suspected it was even a relief, even though he never admitted that – he preferred to make her suffer, make her feel like it was all because of her many failings as a wife and as a human being. That she was being stubborn and wilful and purposely derailing their plan to make a new world for themselves.
She’d been tempted, any number of times, to give in. It would have been easier, in the short term – but she knew that, in the end, she would be signing the death warrant on her own happiness. Her mother had been trapped in a marriage like this, and her childhood had been a rollercoaster of emotional scenes played out over breakfast, tears at the dinner table, her mum looking distraught at the school gate.
She didn’t want that for Jamie, and she didn’t want that for herself.
So they’d finished the renovation, and sold the pub at a better-than-expected profit, and they’d moved on. She’d expected it to be just her and Jamie, which was frightening but also liberating, but instead it was her and Jamie and Joe. That gave her even more courage – the courage to leave completely, and look further afield for their fresh start.
They’d found the restaurant here, in Cornwall, which was both familiar and distant. The little beaches and coves reminded her of Wexford – but the lifestyle was very different. The building needed work, but Joe assured her he could do that, with some local help. It had a patch of land, where they could grow their own veggies, maybe keep chickens for fresh eggs. It had views of the shimmering sea down in the bay, and a dense green woodland. It had potential.
Over the last few months, it had become home. The three of them lived in a caravan, working on the restaurant, making contacts in the local area, building a vision of what they could make it.
Jamie missed his dad less than she thought he would – partly because he was only small, and adaptable. Partly because Adrian hadn’t been that enthusiastic a father anyway. And partly, she knew, because of Joe.
Joe would entertain him for hours, carrying him around their empire on his shoulders, Jamie’s podgy little hands clinging to his dark hair, giggling each time Joe pretended to drop him. He’d follow him around with a toy tool set, helping him hammer in plastic nails and measure wood. They’d go off into the woods, foraging, Joe creating vivid fantasies about the benign fairy-tale creatures they shared their space with.
When she started to feel tired all the time, Joe had picked up the slack. He’d looked at her with concerned eyes, and taken Jamie off on an adventure. He’d made sure she was eating well, and bought her vitamins, both of them initially assuming that her fatigue was due to the stress of her marriage ending and the trials of relocating and starting a new business.
All of those would have been valid reasons for her exhaustion, for the fact that she felt wiped out every morning, that she couldn’t sleep at night, that the smallest of tasks left her grey and passive and empty of her usual energy.
None of those reasons was right, though. The real reason had been the lump she’d discovered not long after, nestled in a long untouched part of her left breast. She’d ignored it to start with – put it down to an infection, or a leftover reminder of breastfeeding, or a bump from her attempts to help Joe with the building work.
Eventually, when it hadn’t gone away, no matter how much she willed it to, she had to tell Joe. He’d just looked at her sternly, then given her a hug, and told her it was all going to be all right. That he would be with her, whatever happened.
He made an appointment with a GP, and she was referred to the breast screening centre, and she’d had what felt like endless days waiting to hear the results of a biopsy. The results, when they were eventually delivered by a serious-faced woman with incongruously bright red hair, had been exactly what she’d dreaded.