Page 72 of Pictures of Him

‘Last night at the party. She was called Ling. She jumped into the lake and she never came back up.’

‘Let me get this straight. You’ve got a new friend called Ling who I’ve never even heard of and last night she died?’

‘It was horrific, Sam. She’s Harry’s wife – she was, I mean. She was the loveliest, sweetest girl you could imagine and they’d been married less than a month.’

Perhaps it’s the mention of Harry’s name – Harry, Lucian, for Sam always a toxic association – but I watch his face paling beneath the suntan, the anger rushing back in.

‘You’re all broken up about some girl you just met? And right here, right now your marriage is unravelling? What’s wrong with you, Catherine? What the hell is wrong with you?’

He turns away from me and I am left staring at his back, an enemy in my own kitchen. There is nothing for me to do except creep away.

Upstairs, I run a bath – our family bathroom with its map-of-the-world shower curtain and Daisy’s fruit-scented potions scattered around the rim – and sit in the hot water, knees hunched, thinking hard. The relief of being here again in the comfort of our world, safe in this place where good things happen, where pancakes are made and streams are celebrated and baths are pungent with kiwi-scented bath foam. I am free to cry now for the girl who has died, the desperate end to her fairy tale and the searing conclusion to ours.

‘Did you ever love me?’ Sam asks, straight off, once the kids are finally in bed, our first chance to talk.

‘I still do.’

He shrugs this off as if it’s nothing.

‘Why did you leave him, tell me that. Why did you put us both through all of this?’

‘Was “all of this” so bad? Two children, the years in London?’

‘You slept with him, didn’t you? Do you think that makes us even?’

‘No, I don’t think it makes us even. Yes, I slept with him. I’m sorry. It wasn’t revenge, if that’s what you think.’

There’s a bottle of red wine on the table, opened but so far untouched. Now Sam grabs it and pours himself a glass. He knocks back a couple of inches, his hands shaking.

‘Fuck, Catherine. Fuck. Maybe I hate you.’

‘What about Julia? What about her? We haven’t even talked about that.’

‘Because Julia doesn’t matter and you know that. I don’t love her, I never did. It was a mistake and I regret it and I’m sorry, of course I am. I was an idiot. But it doesn’t change anything, not really. You are all I ever wanted, stupid, naïve bloody fool that I am.’

I reach out to try and take his hand but he snatches his away. Another fast gulp of his wine.

‘Be honest, you don’t really care about Julia. And it’s freed you up, hasn’t it? It’s not like you lost any time in tracking him down.’

‘I didn’t mean this to happen,’ I say again, and he clicks his tongue, irritated.

‘Yes you did. In your head you did. You think I didn’t know what you were thinking all those times we saw something about him in the papers, or when Liv or I mentioned him and you’d go deathly quiet?’

It’s true. I remember those times, my private agony, or so I thought, when Liv and Sam said your name, Lucian, Lucian Wilkes, and expected me still to breathe.

‘Are you in love with him?’

He asks this like he’s stabbing little letters of hate into the air. And here it is, my chance to put things right. I’ll tell the truth, part of the truth, the only part Sam wants to hear.

‘I love you, Sam. I always did. Despite what you think. Despite everything.’

I see him looking at me, and somewhere very distant a light comes on in his eyes. Hope, that’s what it is. A faint blue flicker of hope.

Four months before: Lucian

I thought I’d confront Jack straight away, but as the days pass, something else is happening. I am transformed by knowledge; I am watching, observing, biding my time. The fact that Jack – my best friend, my supposed brother – continues with his life thinking everything is as normal gives me strength. For me, everything has changed.

Jack appals me. Not just the devastating infidelity with Catherine – an image that haunts me day and night – but the way he has carried on sleeping with Alexa right under his wife’s nose. There’s something so malevolent in that. A selfishness, a lack of care. He is not who I thought he was, and each day seems to prove that a little more. Since our last, fraught meeting on the morning after Ling died, Jack hasn’t bothered to call, to find out about the police interviews I’ve sat through, or the coroner’s findings (accidental drowning, with alcohol a contributing factor), or even, it seems, to ask how Harry is doing, which is not well.

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