Page 67 of Seven Rules for a Perfect Marriage

‘Is there anything else?’ he asks. ‘With Clay, or anyone else?’

‘No. Nothing,’ I say, pleased that we’re finally at the end of this horrible conversation.

‘You’ve never spent time with him without telling me? Other than that?’

Why won’t he drop this? ‘I mean, not never, no. We went to an antiques market, we’ve had coffee before, I went to his house when the news broke. I needed someone to talk to, and he felt like the right person.’

‘I was the right person,’ he half shouts. ‘You barely know Clay!’

Exasperated, I prise the heels off my feet and go to sit down on the little sofa at the far end of the kitchen. I admit, his reaction is surprising. I really did think that he was aware that Clay and I hung out. I’ve never hidden when he and I are WhatsApping, he’s walked into the kitchen when we’ve been on the phone. I thought he might be ignoring it, or not engaging with it, but I was convinced he knew.

‘Because we’re close,’ I say quietly, my arms around my knees. ‘We’ve spent more time together than you realise.’

‘Time together?’

I nod. ‘I’ve needed someone to talk to. About how bad things are. Were.’

‘With us?’

I nod again. ‘I know it doesn’t sound good. But I’ve been lonely, and I don’t trust anyone else to keep it a secret. I thought talking to him was the safest way to make sure that it stayed private, that it didn’t damage the brand.’

Jack rolls his eyes. ‘Why is it always about the brand with you?’

‘It’s not always—’ I argue.

‘Yes, it is – why else would you have let Clay – who is basically just someone we work with – into something that should have been personal to us?’

And then I say the thing I didn’t want to say. The thing I’ve spent months trying not to.

‘Pretty rich from the man who let Clay drive me home from our anniversary party when I was having a miscarriage.’

There’s another long, sharp silence. He’s on the other side of the kitchen, miles of tiled floor between us.

‘You told me to,’ he says eventually. ‘I wanted to take you home, and you said someone needed to handle the people at the party. That was what you wanted. I didn’t want to stay, but I thought you deserved to decide what happened. I wanted to come with you.’

‘Yeah,’ I respond, suddenly overwhelmingly tired. ‘Well, maybe I was having the worst day of my entire fucking life, and you should have stepped up and told me sod everyone we invited, I’m staying with you.’

He pauses for a moment. ‘How was I supposed to know that that was the one moment of this whole new venture ofyours where you didn’t want me to prioritise your image over your feelings?’

‘Oh fuck you,’ I say, getting to my feet. ‘Have you ever asked yourself why?’

‘Yes,’ he snaps. ‘I ask myself that constantly. Why is it always about the job?’

‘Because sometimes it feels like it’s the only thing I’ve got.’

I’m done. I’m done being the driving force, the bad cop, living in a house with someone who thinks that I’ve sold my soul for cashmere and attention. It’s not my fault that I – the less academically brilliant one of the two of us – happened to hit pay dirt on social media. I didn’t start doing this because I wanted money, I started because I liked talking about relationships. And I’ve kept doing it because I still feel that way, and yes, it has brought in some money but I’m not sorry for that. No one else seems angry that I found something I was good at and I made us a life with it. But Jack, who used to see me as the most magical person on the face of the earth, now talks to me like I’m a disgraced politician. I don’t want this anymore. I want to feel loved. I want him to see the best in me. I want him to like me.

And now that I’ve said everything I wanted to say, told him every nasty truth I’d been hiding, I’m quite sure that that ship has sailed. I don’t like who I am when I’m around him, the way that I nag and scold and complain, the way that I’m always the adult, the demanding one, the one objecting and redirecting. All those words they only ever use to describe women – bossy, demanding, dramatic, diva – they swim around my head and they feel horribly,painfully true. I don’t want him to be unhappy, and I don’t want to be unhappy.

Neither of us says anything for a while. Then I get to my feet. Take a bottle of water from the fridge, and trudge slowly upstairs. Every time I hear a movement from outside the bedroom I freeze, thinking it might be him, coming to tell me that he loves me, that we can make this work. But he doesn’t come upstairs, and eventually I hear the door to the spare room close. So I take a suitcase down from the top shelf of my wardrobe and very slowly, very sadly, I start to pack.

Jack

For the second time in a week, I don’t know where Jessica is. She left the kitchen at the end of our argument, and when I woke up the next morning, she wasn’t there. I don’t exactly blame her. I said some horrible things last night, we both did. I fucked up by talking to Verity, and I think we’ve both known for a long time that I screwed up last year, at our anniversary party. So obviously, I feel guilty. But more than that, I feel angry. Angry that we were making progress, that we were doing better and getting better and it looked like we might actually be able to make things okay. We just needed a period of easy, gentle time, and we’d have been okay. And then all this shit – Verity, Clay, the American deal – came at us and the fragile peace we’d been building was crushed.

As soon as I woke up, I called her. Then messaged her. All the messages delivered but weren’t opened or read. Her phone went straight to voicemail when I dialled. So I left it for a while, and then tried again an hour later. And thenagain, another hour later. And at this point, the terror has set in. She’s never done this before. Even during Veritygate she was only gone for a short while to get the newspapers. In the entire time I’ve known her, she has never deliberately not replied to me. Back when we first finished university and went our separate ways, we used to email. I’d write to her first thing in the morning, from the college IT room. She’d reply last thing at night because her mornings were spent working at the local coffee shop and her afternoons were taken up with caring for her mum. I knew, without a moment’s doubt, that when I logged on each morning I’d have a message from her. No playing hard to get. Getting together was hard enough, halfway across the country from each other. If we go much longer without her replying to me, we might reach a new record for the longest we’ve ever gone without speaking. This can’t be right. I need to work out where she is.

If there’s one way to find out if she’s okay, it’s going to be the Seven Rules account. So I go into the spare room that she uses for work, and turn on the massive great iMac. Jessica is not a safety-conscious person, she’s too open-hearted for that. She didn’t lock her doors at uni, she leaves her handbag on the back of her chair when we’re out, lends people expensive clothes and expects to get them back. She’s an optimist. Which is probably why she’s also fairly lax with her computer security. The password to open her user is our wedding anniversary, as it is for basically everything, and anything which isn’t that is ILOVEPONIES123. And once I enter that, her browser pops up, just exactly as it was when she closed it earlier. There are dozens of tabs, because she uses the computer in a cheerfully haphazardway which makes my teeth hurt. I shouldn’t look. But I do. The first one is a men’s jumper, and she’s bookmarked it JACK BIRTHDAY. There’s a handful of other tabs with similar labels.

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