‘I didn’t! She’s lying!’ He’s coming after his sister, because that’s what big brothers do, but also because he needs Rosie to deliver on her promise, to prove that everything is OK. They only have this moment, she knows, to convince them, so Rosie does the opposite of what she wants: she moves towards Seb and whispers quickly, before the kids arrive, ‘Stay at your mum’s. I don’t want you here.’
She keeps her hand on his back so when their children burst into the room, the first thing they see is their parents holding each other but they don’t hear as she whispers to him, ‘I’ll never forgive you for this.’
Greer claps her hands, delightedly shouts, ‘You’re friends again!’ She presses her little body against Rosie’s back to join in the hug and Heath does the same, and Rosie didn’t hear Sylvie come down the stairs but she’s there too, staring at them, unsure, before breaking into a grin and piling on. The kids start laughing and Rosie knows then that they believe everything is healed, and the five of them stay like that, clinging on to each other in the kitchen, until at last Heath, his voice muffled, asks, ‘What’s for lunch?’
Chapter 10
Seb had been close to tears when he got back home from the restaurant, dripping wet, waking Eva who was asleep in the living room. ‘Have you seen Rosie, Mum? Is she here?’
That night he’d got away with telling Eva he and Rosie had just had a row, that everything would be fine. Eva didn’t believe him, of course, but it was late. When Eddy rang to say that Rosie was safe, Eva knew without asking that Seb needed to be alone.
‘Try to sleep,’ she said before she left.
Tonight, when he lets himself into her house, she’s sitting next to the flickering wood burner, a handmade quilt over her knees, almost as if she had been expecting him. As she slowly closes the book on her lap, clocks the overnight bag slung over his shoulder and turns her strong blue eyes on her only child, he knows that he’s going to have to tell her everything.
He sits down opposite his mum, pressing the heels of his hands into his eye sockets so he doesn’t have to look at her, and tells her a version of the truth. He tells her that they hadn’t had sex in so long, that Rosie seemed simply disinterested in their marriage, in him. He hears the pathetic whine in his voice as he says those words. He tells her what he told Rosie, that Abi’s website had fallen into his lap. He tells her how sorry he is, how much he regrets it.
He doesn’t tell her there were so many times he nearly turned back. How he was close to not calling Emma – Abi’s work name – from outside the cafe as she’d instructed him to do. Almost didn’t press the buzzer to the flat and almost didn’t walk up the flights of stairs to the tiny central London studio. But his body kept pushing him forward like it had already disassociated entirely from his brain. He’d noticed his wedding ring just before he knocked on her door. What a fucking cliché. He slipped it into his coat pocket and managed to smile back at the blonde woman who answered the door in a silk kimono. Her feet were bare, tattooed in complicated patterns. So different to Rosie’s; he couldn’t stop looking at them.
‘It’s your first time?’ she asked, still smiling, once they were both inside.
Seb tried to talk but just kind of spluttered and nodded, which made her smile more. He fumbled with the money which she took from him with ease, tucking it into her pocket.
‘It’s OK to be nervous,’ she said. ‘Would you like some fizzy water?’
He was glad to bookend the appointment with a shower, washing both the before and after Seb away so when he left the apartment he wasn’t sure who he was any more. He was just a man who in ninety minutes had replaced his desperate craving with something new, a dull ache he couldn’t name. As he waited for a train back to Waverly, the thought occurred to him that perhaps what he had just done wasn’t so bad after all. Emma was bright, kind and, yes, very attractive, but the whole thing was transactional. She was entirely attentive, but he knew that she didn’t have any more feeling for him than the basic affection she’d maybe feel for a cafe barista. Perhaps he could think of sex with Emma as a kind of physical therapy – relief for body and spirit. Something Rosie might not need but he did, like visiting an osteopath or getting some acupuncture. All the fierce moralizing about it was a waste of time, a cultural obsession that had surely caused a lot of harm and done little good. As an affair was a relationship – that meant being attentive to the subtleties of someone else, their smell, their sense of humour, their values, and sharing those same intimacies with that person – it would engage brain and heart. That was the difference, he told himself. That reasoning was what made him visit a second time.