Page 10 of Don't Let Him In

Her hands yield to my touch as I speak. I feel her melt.

She sighs and says, “I’ll see if I can cancel the order.”

“Thank you, thank you so much. I don’t deserve you, I really don’t.”

We got married three years ago, six months after our first date. It was low-key. Very low-key. Neither of her adult children attended. Her elderly mother came under duress. Her best friend, Fleur, was her matron of honor. Her mother died a year ago and I don’t know what happened to Fleur. My wife’s children visit quite regularly, especially her daughter, Emma, who is currently pregnant with her first child and about to make me, I assume, some sort ofgrandparent?? I can tell this makes Emma very uncomfortable as shedoesn’t really see me as a true member of the family. She doesn’t like me at all. Neither of Tara’s children does. I don’t care too much about that. I can’t say I particularly like them either. I don’t need to like them, and they don’t need to like me. The most important thing, the key to everything, is that my wife trusts me. And she does. Implicitly. I have her passwords to everything. She lets me look at her phone. I have access to absolutely every last aspect of her existence. And she to mine. Or at least to the traces of mine that she knows about. I am a compartmentalized man—I have to be. In order to give women what they want, I need to juggle things, and juggling things necessitates secrets and, occasionally, lies. I can’t give her access to everything. Obviously.

After dinner, I tell her that I’m going to have a shower and I leave her at her laptop, canceling food orders for our drinks party and messaging our guests. I squeeze her shoulders sympathetically as I walk past her and head upstairs. Then I pull my bag from the bottom of the wardrobe. It’s a doctor’s bag. It belonged to my father once upon a time—he was a GP—and is a concoction of compartments and pockets and zipped-up slots. Inside the innermost section of the bag is yet another compartment and inside that is my other phone. I pull it out and turn it on, my heart beating steadily as I type:

I’ve sorted it out, am free next weekend, can be with you at 8 pm on Thursday. Are you still up for it?

I stare at the phone, waiting for the ticks to turn blue, which they do, immediately; the ticks always turn blue immediately. She is quite besotted.

I see that she is typing, and I glance at my reflection in the mirror inside the door of the wardrobe as I wait for her reply to appear. I’mlooking a little rumpled, but my eyes are still bright, I am still better looking than most men I know of my age (I’m nearly fifty-one). I push out my chest and check that my pectorals have not begun to soften into man breasts, feel reassured by the strong outline of them through the fine white cotton of my business shirt. I run my fingers over my jawline, my manicured stubble doing a good job of masking some of the encroaching softness. Then I return my gaze to the phone and see that she has finished typing her response.

8 pm Thursday is perfect. Can’t wait to see you. I’ll meet you at the usual place. The kids are with my ex until Sunday lunchtime, so I’m all yours. Mx

All yours.

I smile. She’s younger than my wife. Only by four years, but it feels like a substantial age difference. Her children are younger. She’s perter. Her waist still has that tightness to it at its narrowest point. Her skin still has a suggestion of dew. Not yet perimenopausal, I suppose. Though not far off. She lives in a picture-postcard cottage in a chichi market town in Kent, a world away from my wife’s slightly sad new-build semi in a soulless development outside Reading. She is a successful businesswoman who can pay her own way in life, and she is lovely, with her cloud of soft blond curls, turquoise eyes, unusually long eyelashes, and soft rose-pink mouth, in a way that my wife, I’m pretty sure, never has been. But also—and this is key—she needs me in a way that she doesn’t even realize she needs me. She still thinks of herself as the dashing divorcée, effortlessly juggling kids and a career whilst keeping her house beautiful, herself physically appealing. She has an active social life, great hair; she thinks she has it all and that she doesn’t need a man. But she does. The way those blue ticks appear so quickly tells me that she does; the way I can still feel the sticky residue of a hasty wax on her inner thighs when we meet upat the last minute; the way she is sometimes clumsy in my presence, fumbles over simple things; the way she plays down her kids, even though I’ve never made the merest suggestion that I would prefer her if she came without them; the way she looks at me with a mixture of lust and terror—terror that I will cool off, lose interest, extinguish this thing I’ve lit here in her life, and leave her to smolder and then die.

She didn’t think she needed a man until I turned up in her life with my Reiss overcoat and my suede Chelsea boots and my extravagant gifts, and the way I look at her as if she and only she is real and everything else is cheap wallpaper, and now she is addicted to something she didn’t know she wanted. To me.

I smile at my reflection in the mirror and then look down again at her message.

All yours.

I reply with a single red-rose emoji.

See you on Thursday, beautiful Martha, I think. I cannot wait.

ELEVEN

Nina is dropping vegan croissants into the air fryer, wearing her business jacket (she had never owned a business jacket before Dad died, now she has a special one, dark blue with red-trimmed lapels, which she wears when she has to see people who are used to dealing with people who look professional). Her phone buzzes and she picks it up distractedly, looks at the notification on her screen, and Ash sees a hot smile pass over her face.

Nick left only an hour ago. Ash had heard the click of the front door, then glanced out of her window to see Nick heading away in the direction of the train station.

Three nights he’d stayed in the end.

The whole weekend.

And now that air all through the house of sex and newness and hormones.

“Did you have a nice weekend?” Ash asks.

“Yes,” her mother replies softly, discreetly. “Yes. It was lovely.”

There’s a pert silence. It feels as if neither Ash nor her mother is breathing.

“Are you…,” Nina begins. She turns to face Ash, looks directly at her, and says, “Are you OK about it? About Nick?”

Ash shrugs and feels a little adrenaline spill into her blood. It’s nota confrontational question, but if she answers it truthfully, it could lead to a row. “I guess.” There’s another silence. Ash ends it by saying, “Are you… I mean—are you OK about it?”

Nina nods. “I am,” she says. “I mean, it’s very unexpected. Obviously. I thought I was still grieving. Iamstill grieving. I really, really am. My heart is still…” She exhales audibly as if she’s just been kicked in her gut. “It hurts, all the time…”

“Even when you’re with him?”

“Yes. Even when I’m with him. But it’s like… it’s almost like I have a new heart alongside the old one, and the new one is fresh and unused, and it can be excited to be with someone and enjoy them and want to get close. If that…” She pauses, looks up at Ash. “If that makes any sense?”

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