Page 13 of The Summer Swap

She’d been so angry and upset she’d simply left the letter inside the book where no one was likely to find it. At the time she hadn’t been in the right emotional state to contemplate doing anything with the information that the letter contained. But now?

She still wasn’t in the right emotional state, but now she had no choice. It was no good telling herself that everything was fine. She had to see for herself. She had to find out what else Cameron had lied about. She had to see for herself whether the painting still existed.

She had to go back.

3

Kristen

Kristen tightened her grip on her phone, glanced over her shoulder to check that Winston and Todd weren’t following her, and slid silently into her old bedroom. It looked the same as it always did, mostly because no one ever slept in it. Kristen herself had only slept in it a handful of times since her marriage, and that had been early in their relationship at Thanksgiving when Theo had a rare night off and had been able to celebrate away from the city. They’d had sex in this very bed, although Kristen hadn’t been able to relax because she was always waiting for Theo to be called back to the hospital. Coitus interruptus. It was a characteristic of their relationship. Drinks with friends, walks along the Charles River, dinner at their special restaurant on Beacon Hill, sex—thanks to the demand of Theo’s job, everything inevitably ended before it was supposed to. Her entire life was a cliff-hanger. It was a wonder they’d managed to have one child, let alone two.

She sometimes joked with her friends that the reason she and Theo were still married when so many of their acquaintances were getting divorced was because they hadn’t spent enough time together to grow tired of each other. Marriage interruptus. They’d built a life that worked for them. Or so everyone thought.

But no one really knew what was going on inside someone else’s marriage, and that was true of hers. No one knew how lonely she was, and she was careful to give no hints. She smiled, she laughed, she played the part of a happily married woman even though most of the time she felt so alone and isolated she might as well have been living on a desert island with only a few palm trees and the odd seashell for company. There were days when she’d wondered if she was clinically depressed, but she knew deep down that she wasn’t.

She was grieving for her father and had no one to share that grief with. Her mother didn’t want to talk. Her children were busy with their lives. Her husband prioritized his patients and didn’t seem aware that underneath her carefully groomed exterior his own wife was seriously injured, too. At her lowest point she’d fleetingly wondered whether stepping in front of a car might be a good way of getting his attention. Maybe then he’d notice that she wasn’t herself. Maybe he’d feel guilty. All this time you’ve had a broken heart, and I didn’t even notice. What sort of a doctor am I?

She felt so alone that a month after her father had died she’d called a grief helpline that she’d found on the internet (she’d withheld her number and given a false name), but the stranger on the other end of the phone had been so overwhelmed by the scale of Kristen’s grief that her only suggestion had been that Kristen should nurture herself and maybe take a soothing bath or treat herself to a new hand cream.

She might as well have suggested using an umbrella in a hurricane.

That was the point where Kristen had realized she was on her own with this. She didn’t blame her children for not noticing how bad she felt because like most mothers she hid her own anguish from them (it wasn’t their job to support their grieving mother), and she didn’t really blame her own mother because they’d never been close. But she did blame Theo. She felt resentful toward Theo and that resentment layered itself on top of other layers of resentment that had built up during their marriage.

Theo had missed the birth of his first child. Theo had been absent when Hannah had been admitted to the hospital with severe croup. Theo had missed parent-teacher conferences, sports days, Kristen’s birthday (twice) and their wedding anniversary (four times).

Kristen had managed to forgive all that. (The man was a surgical genius, after all, with big responsibilities. Also, she’d known who he was when she married him and she refused to be a hypocrite.) She hadn’t been able to forgive his absence when her father had died.

She’d called him from the hospital where her father had been taken. She’d left six messages, each of them more desperate. Theo, I need you.

It had taken him four hours to get back to her. Four hours during which she’d needed his support. His love. Four hours when she’d needed his medical expertise (why couldn’t they save her father?) and a shoulder to cry on. Instead, she’d cried on the doctor who had broken the news of her father’s death to her and her mother. She’d cried on the kind nurse who had arrived with tissues and she’d cried on her mother, although not for long because her mother had been unnervingly composed. By the time Theo arrived, her intense grief had morphed into anger. Her resentment had grown into a huge barrier that separated them. In the days that followed she couldn’t find a way past that barrier.

Losing her dad was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Nothing had prepared her for the depth of her grief. She was an independent woman with her own family, but when her father died, part of her had died, too. The knowledge that he was never coming back, that she would never see him again, sent her into a pit of despair.

Her father had loved her unconditionally. When she’d been with her dad she’d felt important and interesting and truly loved, and she was never going to get that feeling back. She’d gone from feeling alone to feeling crushingly, miserably alone.

And then, at her lowest point, she’d met Jeff. Jeff had listened to her when Theo hadn’t. Jeff had allowed her to pour her heart out. Jeff wasn’t scared of her emotions. Jeff switched off his phone when they were together.

And now Jeff was downstairs.

Heart thudding, she walked into the bathroom and locked the door. She had a list of jobs to do, every one of them urgent, but all she wanted to do was reread the message waiting for her on her phone.

Can’t wait to see you x

Kristen read it twice and then pressed the phone to her chest as if that message were a living thing that she could absorb through her skin straight into her heart. Those words filled the big empty space inside her. They made her feel warm and cared for and connected. It was ridiculous that a simple message could make her happy, and yet it did. It was the kind of happiness that anesthetized you against all the trials of life, and there was no shortage of those, particularly right now when she felt raw and bruised by her mother.

Kristen had spent days planning the party to make it perfect, and yet her mother was behaving as if she was doing Kristen a favor by being there. They’d never had the easiest of relationships, and normally this latest episode would have upset Kristen so much she would have reached the point of screaming at herself in the mirror (an escape outlet with fewer consequences than actually screaming at her mother), but right now she didn’t even care. She’d done what she could to celebrate the birthday and her father. She’d done everything she could to support her mother after Cameron Lapthorne’s death. She’d tried to be thoughtful and caring and now she was done.

You couldn’t help someone who didn’t want to be helped. Her mother could turn up to the event in her nightdress if she wanted to. She could give a speech or not give a speech. She could read from the Kama Sutra. It didn’t matter to Kristen. Everything that had seemed important to her, no longer seemed important because her priorities had changed over the past few weeks.

The only thing that mattered was the message and how it made her feel.

It turned out that the woman on the end of the grief helpline had been right about her needing self-care. But she hadn’t needed a hot bath or hand cream. She’d needed Jeff.

Of all the problems Kristen had encountered in her life, she was completely unprepared for the one she was currently dealing with. She was obsessed with a man who was not her husband.

Even thinking it shocked her. Occasionally she wondered what had happened to her. Had she had a personality change overnight? Fallen asleep and woken up in someone else’s body? Knocked her head in her sleep? Taken something without knowing it?

For twenty-eight years Kristen had been a loyal and devoted wife. She’d raised two children, juggled the demands of the home with the demands of her very busy job (she adored her father but working for him hadn’t been easy), supported her husband even though there were days when they saw so little of each other she could barely remember what he looked like. Even when she was spending yet another night alone in their house, she’d still been proud of him.

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