Page 67 of The Fall-Out

He sighed. ‘Okay. Let’s not beat around the bush. There was an overlap.’

‘When we went to that gig in Camden?’

‘Then, and… after. For a bit.’

‘How long of a bit?’

‘I can’t remember!’ He raised his hand, making a fist as if he was about to thump the table, then brought it down again, gently, and placed it over mine.

‘Was it, like, days? Or weeks or what? Longer?’

‘It was… weeks. Maybe a month. Or two.’

My mouth felt dry. I drank the last of the wine in my glass and then a gulp of water. ‘Why did you tell me you’d ended it with her?’

‘Because I didn’t want to fuck things up. I knew, really early on, that you were right for me and Zee wasn’t. You were – you are – everything I’d always needed. Smart, gentle, loving. I wanted you to be the mother of my kids, even back then. I knew how amazing you’d be at that. But Zee – come on, you know her as well as I do.’

‘What about her?’

‘She’s volatile. Unstable. I didn’t want to hurt her. And…’ A shadow passed over his face – an echo of the conflict I’d seen back when I was first falling in love with him.

‘And what?’ I asked gently.

‘I was worried about what she’d do – how she’d react.’ He twisted his paper napkin like he was wringing water out of it. ‘I had to time it right, let her down gently.’

‘Your timing doesn’t look like it was so great from where I’m sitting.’

‘Yeah, well.’ He shrugged. ‘Maybe I should have done it sooner. My bad. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, right? But at the time, I thought I was doing the right thing.’

‘I tried to do the right thing, too,’ I said. ‘But I still don’t know if it was right.’

‘If what was right? You and me, or – something else?’

I remembered how I’d felt back then, about the secret Zara had asked me to keep. How dishonest it had felt – how disloyal to Patch and mostly to myself. But loyalty to Zara had won out – until it hadn’t.

I still hadn’t broken that promise, not for all these years. Should I break it now? Could I?

‘Patch,’ I began hesitantly, ‘did you know – when Zara couldn’t see you on your weekends off – did you ever suspect there might be something else going on?’

‘What are you talking about? I knew what was going on.’

My mind whirled. Patch was a kind, tolerant man – always had been. But surely he wouldn’t have blithely carried on a relationship with a woman he knew was cheating on him, however deeply he’d been in love with her?

Before I could formulate a question, he carried on. ‘She told me about her brother. She was ashamed – she didn’t want anyone else to know, so I promised I’d never tell.’

I leaned in towards him, confused. The restaurant was noisy – the students next to us had given up eavesdropping on our conversation and were laughing and cheers-ing one another; perhaps I’d misheard him. ‘Brother? What brother?’

He shrugged. ‘See? She never told anyone but me. But I don’t suppose it matters any more; he’ll have been released by now.’

‘Released? From – prison?’

Patch nodded. ‘He was serving a sentence in Greece, for smuggling cocaine. She said he’d always been troubled. She went to visit him there when she could, and sometimes that coincided with my weekends off so we couldn’t see each other. It was one of the reasons why I – why I wanted to protect her. I didn’t want anything else bad to happen to her.’

My chopsticks were frozen halfway between my bowl and my mouth. I had no idea what to say. Maybe the story about Zara’s brother was true and what she’d told me about seeing other men wasn’t. Maybe it was the other way round. Maybe both things were true – or neither.

But I knew one thing for sure – I’d wanted to protect Patch from hurt then and I still did now. Telling him she’d lied to him and betrayed him might have helped me get what I wanted then, but it would achieve nothing now that I had it.

His lie about having broken up with Zara made a bit more sense now. He’d wanted to protect her, even though he’d gone about it in the clumsiest possible way. But his actions had had another consequence – one I doubted he’d even considered at the time. He’d made me into the other woman; he’d made me betray my friend. And now all my protestations to Rowan about how things had happened had turned out to be lies, and Zara’s version of events the truth.

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