Page 74 of The Temp

Picking Georgia up from football practice and going to Wagamama. Fancy joining us? Xx

I quickly type:

No.

I chew my bottom lip, finger hovering over send, delete it and type again:

Thanks. But you guys should spend some quality time together.?

I read it back, then press Send. Tom and I are officially separated. We agreed that our marriage wasn’t working out – the trust had gone – and I couldn’t live with his stinginess a moment longer. The truth is, all I’ve ever wanted was to be loved. To be put first. To be someone’s number one priority. If I’m honest, I don’t think I had any of that with Tom. I’d go as far as saying that he only married me because I was pregnant with his child. Zelda was his first choice when we met all those years ago. Tom just settled for me. Second best Bella, that’s what I am. Maybe I should have it printed on a t-shirt, or tattooed inside my wrist.

A week had passed before I told my family that Tom and I were estranged. It was during a family dinner to celebrate Daisy’s homecoming. I wasn’t surprised by Mum’s reaction. She loved Tom. She even cried. Blamed me, said I was being hasty, ‘So what if he’s parsimonious?’ she’d said. ‘I can think of worse traits.’ Zelda agreed with the latter part of Mum’s assumption and I began to doubt everything again. Until Daisy spoke.

‘I wasn’t going to say anything but now I will.’ Daisy set her cutlery down. ‘On the night of all that hoo-ha with Frank and Stanhope and the police visit, I walked in on Tom having, what looked like, a steamy conversation with a woman on Zoom.’ Zelda gasped, looked at me, grim-faced, while Mum made a noise that sounded as if she was suffocating.

‘I thought you’d gone to bed,’ I said. We all had, bar Tom who was googling smells and the afterlife.

‘My head was buzzing. I couldn’t sleep. I went down to make myself a cup of camomile. The moment he saw me, he slammed the lid of his laptop down, and just sat there, deep in thought, hand still on his laptop, face all flushed and sweaty. I guess he didn’t know how much I’d heard. I wasn’t going to mention it, but his reaction made me suspicious. After a few moments, I asked him, casual as you like, who that blonde bird was. He laughed it off, said it was a colleague, called their conversation a bit of banter. I was like, what, at this time of the morning? Then he made me promise not to tell you, Bella, reckoned you had a bit of a jealous streak.’

A cold silence snapped around the table. Mum, Zelda and I exchanged glances. ‘I gave him the benefit of the doubt,’ Daisy continued. ‘I didn’t want to cause any trouble between the two of you. But he did get a bit frosty with me after that.’ That was why he suddenly wanted her out. She knew too much, couldn’t trust her.

Tom didn’t deny it when I confronted him – called the affair stress-sex. ‘Natalie was a client,’ he explained, which broke all the rules in itself. Health professionals aren’t supposed to date patients, are they? He went on to say that when Liam came to our house that night looking for me, Tom had lost it, thought we were lovers. ‘I am sorry, you know,’ he said, in Wendy and Gary’s hallway when I went round to take him a few of his things.

‘For what? Bribing Daisy, or sleeping with someone else?’

‘All of it. I was lost, weak, and Natalie just...’

‘Took the edge off?’ I finished. ‘Most people have a few large G&Ts.’

He inhaled deeply through his nose. ‘I still love you and I want us to fix this.’

‘It’s too late, Tom. I’m sorry. I’ll send the rest of your things on.’

Then as I reached for the doorlatch he blurted. ‘I know you were in love with him.’ I paused, frowned at the door. ‘I heard you talking to Liam on the phone.’ My frown deepened. ‘Oh, don’t play the innocent. On the night of Linda and Theo’s dinner party, after I’d warned him off you. You couldn’t wait to lock yourself away in the bathroom and phone him, could you? Well, I wasn’t tucked up in bed, as you thought. I was standing outside, listening.’ I spun on my heel then, and looked at him incredulously. ‘I heard you pleading with him to give you another chance. Begging for his forgiveness. Pathetic.’

‘You’re insane,’ I retorted.

‘That’s what all those gym visits were about, weren’t they?’ he hissed. ‘Losing all that weight. You wanted to look good for him.’

I shook my head. ‘You really are deluded. Hang on, I know what you’re trying to do, accuse me of infidelity to make yourself look better to save face. But you’re the one who got caught with his pants down.’ I went to open the front door when his hand slammed against the panel. I could feel his hot breath against my ear, smell the alcohol on his breath. He was pissed.

‘But it’s what you said to him next that sent me into the arms of another woman. Do you remember what it was?’

I turned around and squared up to him. ‘You were drunk then and you’re drunk now.’

‘Thought not,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll refresh your memory, shall I?’ He cleared his throat, then said, ‘Please, don’t push me away. Just say the word and I’ll leave him.’ My face twisted in confusion and I gave a little mirthless laugh, told him he was pathetic. ‘But he didn’t want to know, did he? Refused to leave his wife and kids for you. And you…’ He poked my shoulder. ‘Got so mad that you chucked your phone across the bathroom.’ I shook my head in disbelief, told him he was mad. ‘That’s how you shattered your phone screen. You didn’t drop it in the Tesco carpark at all, did you?’

My phone rings on the bedside table, breaking me out of my reverie. I peer at it and my heart stops. It’s Fiona, Liam’s widow.

Chapter 67

I’ve never been a Fiona fan. I mean, she’s not the most level-headed person on the planet. Linda almost fainted when I told her that Fiona was [email protected] and not Frank, as we all suspected. I should’ve worked it out, really. We all called Fiona, Ona, back in the day, apart from her ex-husband Steve, who insisted on calling her Fi, which she loathed.

Liam once told me that Steve took out a restraining order on Fiona because she refused to accept that their marriage was over. I gasped when he said she’d keyed Steve’s brand-new Range Rover. What a vindictive, thuggish thing to do. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Liam also confided that she’d stalked his new girlfriend and almost ran the pair of them over as they were leaving their local pub. ‘She was in a bad place, Bells,’ Liam confessed. ‘On antidepressants. Drinking far too much, not eating properly. She’s a different person now. Therapy helped. Apart from the jealousy thing, that is. I think that’s just how she’s wired. But, hey, none of us is perfect. I’ve got a good life with her and the kids.’

Biting my thumbnail, I stare at her name on my phone until it rings out. A beat and then it starts again. Surely, she won’t give Daisy any trouble…will she? No, of course not. I’m being silly. Paranoid. She’s a changed woman. Come on, Bella, where’s your sense of charity? The woman’s bereaved, at a loose end.

Fiona told me that Liam didn’t have any life insurance, when I rang to offer my condolences, and if that weren’t enough, her landlady was kicking them out at the end of the month. Finding a landlord who accepted housing benefit tenants was near impossible. ‘I’m sorry for sending you those awful emails, Bella,’ she admitted. ‘Once the police identified the body, they gave me all his belongings. I went through his phone and when I saw your name I lost it. I thought you two were…you know.’ I told her it was fine. That it was our fault. We shouldn’t have liaised behind her back. ‘I was looking for someone to blame for his death. I’m so sorry.’

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