Page 49 of My Husband's Wife
‘Really,’ she replies. ‘You spent years being lied to by that prick you married and you kept going back to him, and now this. You’ve put me through a lot of heartache, sis.’
‘It’s not the same.’
‘Isn’t it?’
The problem with Camille is she always thinks she knows better and that annoys Madison. She hasn’t even told her about the conversation she had with Theo earlier. She wanted to say so much more, like about seeing those photos and how Theo had been looking at Eva’s social media. As she begins to speak, she hears Francesca talking to Camille.
‘Mummy, my tummy’s bad again.’
‘Look, I have to go. Just promise me you’ll think things through properly, Madison. We love you loads.’
‘I promise,’ but it’s too late; Camille has already ended the call.
Madison sinks into the bath, her ears submerged while she tries to calm her racing thoughts but it’s not working. Instead, she grabs her phone from the window ledge and searches for Eva on Instagram. Her profile isn’t even private. She scrolls through the photos of Eva’s dog and house until she stops at Eva’s wedding photos again. After pressing the photo, she pinches it to zoom in. Eva looks so pretty in her ivory dress, and he looks quite brooding and handsome. She refers to the man she loves as Zach in the description but she hasn’t tagged him.
Madison stares at him for longer this time; she’s seen him before but she can’t work out where and when. He wasn’t at the Sea Horse Hotel when they went for the meeting, and he didn’t pick Eva up from the salon; she drove herself.
Maybe she has got baby brain? How could she have ever met Eva’s husband?
That’s it. She remembers. She saw him with another woman around Christmas. They came to speak to Theo about setting up a computer system for their new business.
Madison scrolls on and sees a photo of Zach with Eva, and underneath Eva calls him The best plasterer in the world. There is no mention of the other woman, the one with the little boy. Maybe he’d been helping her out. No, she remembers Theo describing them as a couple who had a business selling something. They’d been holding hands when they arrived. As soon as she’d made them a coffee, she’d left them talking with Theo in the cabin. She scrolls down further, seeing if she can see the woman on Eva’s posts, but she can’t. There is the back of a woman at a café and it could be the same woman, but she can’t be sure. All she can see are her long, wild brown curls caught under her coat.
Forty
Madison jolts up in the bath to the sound of a car engine pulling up outside the front of the house. It’s one in the morning and rain patters against the rattling windowpane. Shivering, she steps out of the freezing cold water and grabs a towel to wrap around herself. She’d been asleep for over an hour. Buster interrupts the silence by barking at the front door. She stands on the landing, dripping water on the carpet while listening out for a knock at the door, but a few seconds later, Theo calls out as he comes through the back door.
After checking on Emily and putting her bathrobe on, she creeps downstairs to find Theo sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea.
‘I heard the car pulling up. Did you go out?’
He furrows his brows. ‘No, I’ve just finished up in the cabin. I didn’t hear a car.’
Maybe she’d been half asleep. She’d been having this disturbing dream about Emily crawling across a flame-filled landing, then a crazy drunken woman who failed to save her when she could have. The woman in her dream couldn’t have been Theo’s mother; she was too young. It was the woman who came with Zach to see Theo, the free spirit with the brown curls and the pink wellies. ‘How did tonight go? Did you film the badgers?’
He shakes his head. ‘I gave up in the end and left the wildlife cams running from the den. I went back to the cabin instead and worked on the McKinley job and built a PC for another client. Have you just got out of the bath? I thought you’d have been in bed.’
‘I fell asleep and woke up freezing cold.’ She pauses, wondering how to ask about Zach. ‘I was thinking, do you remember a couple that came here before Christmas? They wanted to talk to you about their new business and their computer system?’
‘Er, can you be more specific?’
‘Woman with really long brown, curly hair with a little boy. She was with a man who had dark hair. We don’t get many people bringing their kids along. The little boy asked for the Wi-Fi code so he could play a game on his mum’s phone.’
He closes his eyes for a few seconds then clicks his fingers. ‘Yes, they didn’t go for my quote so I didn’t do their job. What’s this about?’
‘Can you remember anything about them?’
‘I don’t know them, so why would I?’
She waves a dismissive hand and pours a glass of water. ‘I think I’m just having weird dreams. It’s nothing. I thought I saw him the other day.’ She didn’t see him the other day, but she needed an excuse to bring him up.
‘Where?’
Now she has his attention but she doesn’t know why. ‘At the grocers by the salon. I said hello but he ignored me. He obviously couldn’t remember me so it’s nothing really. Are you ready for bed?’
‘I think I’ll just wind down a bit. You go up. I’ll be there soon.’ He stands and kisses her. ‘I’ll check on Emily when I come up. I saw that you left some milk in the fridge, so I can feed her again if she’s hungry.’
As she goes to leave, she spots Theo’s trainers at the back door and they look saturated and mucky. He was wearing his walking boots when he left for the cabin, so why were his trainers there? It was him pulling up in the car. She hadn’t imagined it. But where had he been at this time of the night, and worse, why was he lying – again?
