Page 51 of The Honeymoon Affair

‘You’re such an eejit, Charles Miller.’ I lean across to him and squeeze his hand. ‘You’d never write a book I hate. I’m always on your side, no matter what. You know that.’

‘I know I should know that,’ he says. ‘But sometimes . . . well, I wouldn’t blame you if you’d lost a little of your respect for me.’

‘Absolutely not,’ I say. ‘You’re one of the best writers I know.’

‘Respect for me as a person, not as a writer.’

‘I’ll always respect you,’ I say. ‘Always.’

‘That’s not what you said when you left me.’

‘The past is the past and we’ve moved on,’ I tell him. ‘We’re in a much better place than we were a couple of years ago.’

‘Do you ever wish we’d done things differently?’

‘I don’t think we could have,’ I say after a moment’s silence. ‘I think we did our best.’

‘Whatever about anything else, I was lucky the day I sent my first manuscript to you.’ His tone, which had been wistful, suddenly becomes positive again.

‘I know.’

‘We did great things together.’

‘We still can. And who knows, you may even get nominated for both the literary awards and the crime awards. A double whammy.’

He laughs and hugs me. I hug him back. Then I lean my head against his shoulder and savour the moment. We sit together in a silence so complete that the only sound I hear is my own breathing.

This is what I missed when our marriage started to go wrong. When I was growing my business and signing hot new clients, and collaborating with a media agent to look after movie and streaming deals and building up my list of overseas agents so that my authors would have access to a global market. When everything seemed to be coming together but in fact we were setting it up to fall apart.

It wasn’t inevitable, I suppose. But there were competing pressures on us, and Charles couldn’t quite get his head around the fact that my other authors were as important to me, professionally at least, as he was. Backed up by his interfering mother, who seemed to think she knew more about the business than I did, he wanted to know what deals they were getting and what they were writing and how I thought they were doing, even though I told him that this was confidential information between me and them. He didn’t like the amount of time I spent with them, especially Cosmo Penhaligon, an up-and-coming author in his mid thirties who lived in a picture-perfect clifftop house in Cornwall. I occasionally stayed there for a few days while we worked on his manuscripts together. Charles hated the fact that I was staying in another man’s house and made his feelings clear. I told him not to be so childish. Nevertheless, I understood it. Cosmo was younger than him, almost as attractive, and even if he wasn’t as successful as Charles, he was doing very well. I knew he was going to be an important client for me and I was giving him a lot of attention. I told Charles that he had to trust me, even though, when Cosmo turned on his own brand of charm, it wasn’t easy to trust myself.

‘It’s hard to believe it’s all about work when you’ve bought at least six new outfits for your visit to Cornwall,’ said Charles one day when I was heading off to the airport.

‘Because there’s a heatwave in England and I need to dress for it.’

‘In shorts and crop tops?’

‘For God’s sake, Charles, stop being so silly.’ I glanced out the window. ‘My taxi is here. I’m off.’

‘When are you back?’

‘I already told you. The weekend.’

I leaned towards him to kiss him, but he turned away so that my lips glanced off his cheek.

I heaved a sigh of relief when I got into the taxi. My mind was already on Cosmo’s book. I didn’t need Charles’s petty jealousy distracting me.

The kiss Cosmo greeted me with when I arrived at his home just outside St Ives was a lot warmer than the cheek-grazing I’d had with my husband. And it wouldn’t have taken much for my stay with him to have crossed the line. After all, Cosmo’s books were very erotic, and we were sitting side by side talking about sex scenes as well as sharing glasses of wine in his gorgeous garden overlooking the sea. If I’d been a character in one of Charles’s novels, I’d definitely have slept with Cosmo Penhaligon, but I couldn’t afford the fallout.

When I got back to Dublin, I discovered that Charles had decamped to Mayo. He hadn’t texted, but simply left a note on the kitchen counter, and a bundle of laundry in the basket. I was so annoyed that if I could’ve caught a flight back to Cornwall right then, I would have. But I was meeting Janice Jermyn the following day and I certainly wasn’t going to stand up one of my favourite authors for an affair with another. When I finally did speak to Charles, he told me that his mother and sister had joined him for a few days, but that he was sure I had better things to do than come to Mayo. I spent the next two weeks rage-working my way through more admin than I normally did in a month, and comparing and contrasting Cosmo and Charles as clients and as men. It was Charles who kept falling short.

However, when he eventually arrived home, he was in much better spirits and I’d worked off most of my anger. We didn’t talk about my visit to Cornwall or his stay at the cottage, and although things weren’t back to normal, the atmosphere between us slowly improved. I thought we’d dodged a bullet.

We had, but the damage was already done.

A couple of weeks later, Charles heard me on the phone talking to the organiser of a prestigious literary festival in Canada about Cosmo’s availability for an event. He wasn’t free for the slot they were interested in, but he told me he’d be able to do it later in the week, and hoped I’d be able to swing it for him because he really wanted to go. Although the organiser was keen to have him, she said that switching the date would be difficult and suggested that if Charles was available instead, he’d be a good alternative.

‘If you can’t change the date, I’ll discuss it with Charles,’ I told her. ‘But I think it would be of real benefit to your festival to have Cosmo.’

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