Page 42 of A Secret Escape

Milly sighed. “Nic—”

“I know, I know—you would never do a thing like that. Why isn’t everyone in the world like you? It would be a better place.” She finished her lemonade, wishing in that moment that it was wine. “Anyway, I believed him. More fool me, as it turned out. But we were together for almost a year, and it was blissful. Not together the whole time of course, because by then I was working on something different and so was he, but we used to fly to meet each other and have these amazing weekends. We had a trip to Rome and had a midnight trip around the Colosseum wearing wigs and glasses and pretending to be Spanish tourists. I thought he was the one. I thought I’d finally found someone who was going to be in my life forever.” Saying it aloud sounded so stupid now.

Milly reached across the table and took her hand. “What happened?”

“There were photographs. His wife saw them. Turned out that he really had been faithful up until that point—he was honest about that—but seeing him with someone else shook her up. I think it made her realize that she was going to lose him. She didn’t want to lose him. She decided she wanted him back.” She felt Milly’s hand tighten on hers, and the comfort of knowing that someone cared, that she wasn’t alone with everything, was almost overwhelming. She’d missed their connection so much. “She confronted me in the restaurant as if I was some sort of evil seducer and she was the wronged wife. It was truly awful. And of course someone filmed it, because everyone films everything these days.” She often relived that moment, the deep humiliation and the devastation.

“And Justin decided he wanted to stay with her? After two affairs?”

“It was more than two.” Nicole rubbed tears from her cheeks. She hadn’t even known she was crying. “But yes, he decided he wanted to stay with her. So that was that.”

It wasn’t quite all of it, but it was enough for now.

“You poor thing. No wonder you’re feeling raw.” Milly was still holding her hand, offering comfort as generously as she would have done when they were children.

“You probably think I deserve it because he was married.”

“No one deserves to get their heart broken, Nic. Life is complicated. He led you to believe his marriage was over, and you believed him.”

Nicole felt a rush of love for her friend. And although a part of her knew that Milly wouldn’t have been so warm and accepting if she’d known what Nicole wasn’t telling her, she ignored it. “It’s over now, anyway. Done.”

“When you called me you said you were desperate. What tipped you over the edge?”

“The press wouldn’t leave me alone. Everywhere I went, I had a camera pointed at me. That incident in my home shook me up. I was scared in hotels. I didn’t trust anyone. I needed somewhere quiet and safe to think, and I couldn’t think of anywhere else. I called you.”

“I’m glad you called me. And I’m glad you’re here.”

“Really?” Nicole put her free hand on top of Milly’s so that they were joined across the table. “You mean that?”

Something softened in Milly’s eyes. “Yes, I do.”

The relief was indescribable, but it was threaded with guilt. “I wasn’t there for you when you needed me, and I thought—”

“Why weren’t you? Tell me why. Help me understand.”

The question caught her off guard.

Nicole felt the breath trap in her throat. From the moment Milly had picked her up from the railway station she’d known this moment would come, but now it was here and she wasn’t ready.

She should simply tell the truth, but their relationship was still tender and vulnerable, and she was afraid that if she did that, what they had might be destroyed forever. She couldn’t take that risk. Their friendship meant too much to her. If the last few months had taught her anything, it was that.

“I was in a bad place.” That much was true. “Things were difficult.”

“But then, why didn’t you reach out to me?” There was a small furrow of confusion between Milly’s brows. “Since when haven’t we done that?”

“You had enough problems. And I was barely holding it together. I sort of retreated. It was a survival thing.” There was more. So much more, but she wasn’t ready to divulge that. “But you’ve heard my sad story. Now I want to hear yours.”

For a moment she thought Milly might linger on the topic of their estrangement, but her friend sighed and eased her hands away.

“Mine is nowhere near as glamorous as yours. But if you think you were a fool, you should try being me. When Richard said he was working late and traveling, I believed him.”

There was so much she wanted to say, but Nicole forced herself to just listen.

Milly glanced toward the house to check there was no sign of Zoe. “It had been going on for six months before he told me. Six months. And I didn’t know. Can you believe that? I felt like such an idiot.”

“Milly—”

“No, don’t say anything. There’s nothing to be said. I should have guessed, but I was busy getting on with what I thought was our shared life, and I didn’t notice that my husband was contorting himself into various positions with Avery that clearly had nothing to do with yoga.”

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