Page 42 of Happily Never After
He sighs. ‘Adam and I have been friends since primary school and we’ve always had each other’s backs. We both moved to London after university so it seemed entirely natural that we’d share a flat, and it was a lot of fun, to begin with, anyway. We had the typical bachelor lifestyle, you know?’
‘Umm, not having ever been a bachelor, I can’t say I do.’
‘Work hard all week, play even harder at the weekend. I don’t think I’d be boasting if I said we used to have the best parties.’
‘Sounds fun.’
‘It was. Things did calm down a bit as we got older and, after a while, Adam started going out with Holly, and I met Roisin. The parties stopped and were replaced by the four of us enjoying long Sunday brunches and walks in the park instead.’
‘Still sounds pretty good.’
‘It was, until Adam and Holly split up. Suddenly, he resented me spending time with Roisin. He wanted to resurrect the party lifestyle and got pissed off with me because that wasn’t what I wanted any more. He blamed Roisin, of course, and started being really snappy with her too.’
‘He was jealous of your relationship.’
‘That’s the weird thing. I’m not actually sure he was. What he wanted was us to split up so he and I could go back to the old days.’
‘That’s not how the world works.’
‘I know that, but Adam didn’t seem to. Anyway, he made it some kind of personal quest to break us up, by fair means or foul. In the end it turned out to be foul.’
‘What did he do?’
‘He slept with Roisin.’
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‘I don’t understand. He hated her, right? She didn’t like him either. How does that even work?’
Finn gazes into the river. ‘I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve asked myself that very question.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘He engineered it so I’d walk in on them.’
‘Bastard. What happened?’
‘Oh, he was clever. It’s a move I like to call the “reverse Iago”. You could probably use it in one of your books, although I’ll want a share of the royalties.’
‘Iago as in theOthellocharacter?’
‘That’s it. So, in the play, Iago fills Othello’s head with doubts about whether his wife, Desdemona, is being unfaithful to him. That’s what Adam did to Roisin. I found out later that he’d been engineering ways to bump into her when I wasn’t around, and he’d use the opportunities to suggest I’d been closer to Holly than he’d been comfortable with. He even insinuated that he and Holly had split up because there was something going on between her and me. Anyway, Roisin didn’t believe him to beginwith, but Adam is a good salesperson and knows how to spin a yarn, so it wasn’t long before the doubts began to creep in.’
‘And she didn’t talk to you about this?’
‘No, but what could I have said anyway? We’d all got on really well when it was the four of us and the best way to sell a lie is to lace it with a known truth. So he used the fact that Holly and I had been friendly towards each other to imply that there was more, and over time she came to believe it. From there, all you apparently need is some alcohol to lower inhibitions, a suggestion of revenge sex to settle the score and bingo.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘Yes. Of course, Roisin realised that he’d played her the moment I walked in and caught them, but it was too late. The damage was done.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Roisin was distraught, but I’ll never forget the look of satisfaction on Adam’s face. I moved out the next day and haven’t spoken to him since.’
‘And Roisin?’
‘We tried to patch it up, but it proved to be too big a thing for us to get over. We split up a few weeks later. Last I heard, she’d moved back to Ireland.’
