Page 52 of The Affair
Connie growled in frustration, throwing herself back in the wooden chair. ‘I know I did,’ she said softly.
Jared seemed to be waiting for her to go on.
‘I don’t want to live without you in my life, Connie,’ he said, when she didn’t say anything more.
A shiver of dread shot through her at his words. She felt she was pounding on a hamster wheel, going round and round and coming back to exactly the same horrifying place. But she could think of nothing to say that might halt the wheel. She had assured her sister that Jared appeared perfectly normal to Devan and Neil and his new friends in the village. But the look in his eyes right now, as he singularly failed to accept what she was telling him, seemed off-the-scale delusional. Exhaustion overwhelmed her. She felt too tired to argue any more.
Jared was smiling now, his face relaxed. ‘Trust me, Connie. You have to trust me. I’d never do anything I thought might hurt you.’
As they got up, she remembered something. ‘So did you really work with Fiona Raven?’
‘Of course. We did some stuff on kitchens together, a while back.’
‘“Stuff”?’
‘She wanted to include kitchen design and how it works in one of her books.’
He spoke easily, seemed to be telling the truth.
‘Bit of a coincidence,’ she commented, as he held the pub door open for her.
‘I prefer to think of it as synergy,’ Jared said.
Connie walked out into the deserted pub car park. Turning to him one last time as she approached her car, she said, her tone cold and uncompromising, ‘Just goaway, Jared, get on with your life.’ She looked him directly in the eye. ‘Or it’ll destroy us both.’
‘Let’s ask someone else with Jed,’ Connie said to Devan, when she got back with the groceries. She was still hoping, vainly, Jared might do as she’d asked and cry off. But she knew that was unlikely. At least if there were other people as a buffer, his opportunities for mischief would be reduced. Her husband was sitting exactly where she’d left him, with the addition of a glass of red wine on the table beside him. He looked up and frowned.
‘We could. But I thought it might be nice, just the three of us. You could get to know him better. He’s a lot of fun.’
‘We owe the Birtwhistles.’
Devan groaned. ‘Please, no. They only ever talk about house prices and their super-clever Oxbridge grandchildren.’
She laughed. ‘We’ve got to have them some time.’
‘Yeah, but not tomorrow. Let’s just have a cosy evening with Jed.’
Connie looked on in disbelief as she watched Devan and Jared, sitting at the kitchen table, begin to tuck into the pasta that her husband had cooked.How did this even happen?She was unable to raise a forkful to her own mouth. She knew she must, and praise Devan’s cooking into the bargain. But she felt as dumb and inanimate as the fork in her hand.
‘Connie travels,’ Devan was saying. ‘She’s a tourmanager for a train company. Goes all over Europe, don’t you?’
She stared blankly at her husband. ‘Umm, yes.’ She couldn’t look at Jared.
But she heard him say politely, ‘That’s a difficult job, I imagine. All those people to herd on and off trains.’
‘I love it,’ she said dully.
‘Tell Jed where you’ve been,’ Devan urged, giving her a puzzled look. Connie was usually the best of the two at providing lively conversation at their suppers.
Forced to respond, she finally met Jared’s eye with a half-smile. ‘Oh, you know. The usual – Italy, Germany, France.’
For a second his gaze seemed fixed on her, his eyes so glazed and intimate she was sure Devan would notice. She frowned and he snapped out of it.
‘Have you been to the Italian lakes?’
She held her smile steady.This isn’t a bloody game, she wanted to shout. ‘I do Como and Garda a lot. Beautiful.’ Her answers, she knew, were monosyllabic and unconvincing. But to engage properly with Jared felt impossibly dangerous. She was certain she would give something away.
‘Desenzano, on Lake Garda, is one of my favourites,’ Jared was saying. ‘Do your tours go there?’
