Page 71 of My Husband's Wife
‘He’s okay. He’s actually staying with Will for a few days. I know he’s not Aaron’s biological father but he’s been the only father that Aaron has ever known. That counts for a lot. He’s finally come round and Aaron is thrilled to spend time with him.’
‘You’re lucky you have him.’
‘I know.’ Nicole pauses and looks down, stopping Madison from continuing to comb her hair. ‘I have to tell you something.’
Madison frowns and looks at Nicole in the mirror.
‘I sent you a text message, telling you that Theo was a liar and not to marry him. That must have been worrying for you but I wanted to warn you about him, that’s all. I thought you should know. I tried to warn Eva too, but as usual it came out all wrong. She thought I’d been sleeping with Zach, instead of taking what I said as a drunken rant about Theo.’
Madison lets out a long breath. ‘I knew I received that message. It was gone when I went back to look for it.’
‘I messaged Theo after, telling him that I’d messaged you. I couldn’t help myself. I know by doing that I was adding fuel to the fire, but I was happily being reckless in the moment. He must have deleted your message,’ Nicole says.
Madison thinks back to when she was sitting in his office on the couch while he tapped away at his computer. He could have easily deleted the message.
‘I came to the cottage several times to speak to you, tell you what he was like, but when it came to it, I chickened out. I was in the woods one night, trying to psych myself up and you came out with Emily. When you were walking around the shed, you left her asleep but she woke up. I couldn’t help but take a look at her. She grabbed my hair, and I ran. I’m sorry if I scared you but I couldn’t do it. He’d threatened to kill me, and if you ran in screaming, telling him I was outside, I don’t know what he’d have done.’
Madison’s hands are shaking. ‘Sorry, I need a break. Can’t cut your hair with these hands.’ She wipes a tear away. ‘Have you spoken to Eva?’
‘I called her and told her everything. She said she needs time to think so I thought I should at least respect that.’
‘You told her how you and Hugo met?’
‘Yep, warts and all. She was owed the full truth; after all; we are all connected forever now. Our children are half siblings. I don’t know about you, but I want Emily and Caiden to be a part of Aaron’s life. I feel as though we have a really special family, and I weirdly love you both, and the kids. I just hope Eva comes round because I miss her.’
Madison feels fuzzy at the idea of them all being one family, connected by their kids, and she doesn’t want to let them go. She swallows. The burden of a lie – her lie – runs deep. Madison thinks back to her ex, the man who kept drawing her back into his life. Like an addict, she tried to get away but when he came calling, she’d crave him. It was easy for Camille to tell her to walk away, never speak to him again, but it wasn’t that easy. Being with Theo had helped her to start moving on.
She thinks back to the night she and Nicole sat in the rain with Buster, waiting to be rescued, and she realises that friendships like theirs are special, which is why she will never tell them that Hugo is not Emily’s father. She can never tell her ex the truth either because he’d want to be in her life again. Like an addict, she needs to stay away from him forever.
Sixty-Two
Nicole
Madison has stopped shaking so she snips away at Nicole’s hair. Nicole can’t help but think of Eva and how she now knows most of the truth.
She didn’t spare a second thought for Eva when she met Hugo all those years ago. One five-minute quickie in a layby with him had resulted in her finding the real love of her life, Aaron. At the time, she hadn’t cared that Hugo had a wife waiting for him back at their holiday rental. She only cared that the stupid raven had unstuck itself from the dashboard and that it kept getting caught under her buttocks as they had sex in the driver’s seat of his car. She and Will had argued that night, mostly because of her drinking again. Will had left her in the pub, and she and Hugo had got on well, too well. She left his car fifteen minutes later with only the raven as a reminder, that’s until she found out she was pregnant with Aaron.
She knew that Will wasn’t Aaron’s father but keeping that information to herself had seemed like the right thing to do at the time.
Madison gathers up about twenty centimetres in length of Nicole’s hair. ‘Are you ready to say goodbye to it?’
Nicole smiles and nods. It’s time to move on.
As Madison continues, Nicole closes her eyes and thinks back to after Aaron was born. Nicole had tracked Hugo down online. She knew his name and found out that his wife had a baby before she’d had Aaron. There was one particular post on Instagram that had been removed as fast as it was posted, but Nicole would never forget it. It was a baby scan of twins; and Eva had called one of the babies Caiden and the other one Emily.
Eventually, she stopped looking on Instagram at Eva’s posts, that was until five years ago. Nicole had the shock of her life when she spotted Hugo walking along the beach in Combe Martin. She feared he’d come to blow her life apart. She went online and saw that his wife, Eva, was sad at his passing. Her obsession with him and Eva became more in real life instead of online, after that day. Nicole had travelled up to Malvern many times just to watch Eva and Caiden. Her dad, bless him, always looked after Aaron. It had been his way of trying to make it up to her after leaving her when she was three. While watching Eva, Nicole saw how sad she was and she wanted to tell her that Hugo was alive, but she still couldn’t be sure it was him. Being wrong wasn’t an option. Instead she stayed a while that day, watching how Eva tended to the tree she’d planted in Hugo’s honour. As soon as Eva had left it, Nicole had dug up the letter that Eva wrote to him. She dug up the wedding ring just after Eva moved to Combe Martin, knowing that it could be used to unnerve Theo, or Hugo – whoever he was.
She thinks back to the nights she spent checking up on Eva after Hugo had died, wondering if she should contact her and deciding not to. Eva has been a part of her life for such a long time and she didn’t know it. Nicole’s fingers had typed out message after message, only to delete them after. What if she was wrong about Hugo being alive? The last thing she ever wanted to do was upset the poor bereaved widow, and she’d also have to upset her more when she told her about Aaron.
By then, her own marriage had been falling apart. She and Will had been bickering for months but Will still thought Aaron was his son, despite moving back to Kent. Nicole lost their house, then she struggled to pay the rent on the house next door to her father’s, so her poor dad had no choice but to take them in.
‘Your hair is amazing,’ Madison says as she begins a bit of fine tuning.
‘You’re making it amazing.’ Nicole thinks back to the moment when everything changed, the moment Zach came into her life. While scrolling through social media in the middle of the night, she saw a missing person photo pop up – a man who was known to have been seen in the area – and she knew it was Hugo from the obituary photo. There was no name attached. The nose and the slightly horsey look about him were two things that gave him away. The mole sealed the deal for her. It was Hugo. She replied, telling Zach that she knew where Hugo lived. Ever since then, she’d helped Zach to try to expose Hugo; but the closer they got to Hugo, the more she took it upon herself to rile him up.
She wanted him to feel that his past was catching up on him. Those raven sucker toys were easy to find online. She ordered another and left it outside Hugo’s shed, then she left the wedding ring in their house. She wanted him to know that he was about to be exposed, though she had never wanted to put Madison and Eva in harm’s way.
She’ll never tell Eva that she watched her for years, that’s just weird. And she’ll never tell her that she left the raven toy in her new house while Zach was at the DIY shop.
