‘If you don’t want to blackmail us and you don’t want to be with Seb, this is all just really fucking unlucky?’
Abi nods, breathes out through her mouth. She notices how Rosie is watching her now, seems to be studying her mouth, her hands. Imagining all those things her mouth and hands have done, all the licking and sucking and stroking.
‘Did you never think about us? The families, the marriages you’d be wrecking?’
Abi looks at Rosie and suspects that deep down Rosie knows the answer.
‘Rosie, I was never a threat to your marriage—’
But Rosie shouts, interrupting Abi, ‘My husband paid you for sex – of course you were a threat to my marriage!’
Abi mustn’t say any more. She needs this to end. ‘What do you want, Rosie?’
Abi thinks Rosie isn’t going to answer, so she’s surprised when Rosie, her voice taut but clear, says, ‘I want to know what he wanted. I want to know what you did with him.’
‘Oh, Rosie,’ Abi says, her heart aching for them both, ‘please don’t …’
‘Tell me!’ Rosie says, angry suddenly.
Abi tells her the truth. ‘I don’t remember much.’
Rosie’s face lifts with shock before her eyes narrow, disbelieving, repulsed. ‘You don’t remember?’
‘I saw hundreds of men, Rosie. Hundreds. All kinds of men with all kinds of issues. I’m sorry to say your husband, with whatever marital stuff he had or has going on in his privileged life, didn’t make a huge impression.’
Abi worries she’s overdone it, but she’s started telling the truth now and doesn’t want to stop, not yet. She glances at Rosie who is frozen, appalled but gripped, so Abi keeps talking. ‘The reason I remembered him that night at yours was because of his scar.’ Abi points towards her lip. ‘My grandad was born with a cleft palate, so …’ She shrugs again.
‘Get out,’ Rosie says quietly. ‘I need you to get out now.’
Abi understands. Rosie doesn’t want Abi to see her scream or cry or do whatever she needs to do.
Abi reaches for the door handle and is about to do as she’s told but stops, because she needs something from Rosie too, and Rosie hasn’t asked, hasn’t bothered to think about Abi’s needs in all this. ‘Rosie, there’s something I have to ask of you.’
They look at each other and, embarrassingly, Abi feels her own eyes burn. They always do when she thinks about her girls, the years of lying.
‘If you’re going to tell everyone about Seb and about what I used to do, then please’ – she forces the words out – ‘please give me the chance to tell my girls before the whole town knows. Please.’
Abi hoped that saying goodbye to Emma, her old persona, meant she’d never have to tell the girls. That with Waverly, their new schools and friends, her girls would lose any interest in their old lives in London. The past wouldn’t exist any more, even to Abi, and they could all live like young children, focused only on the day in front of them.
But it isn’t up to Abi any more. It’s up to Rosie and her friends. Rosie looks away as tears rise in her eyes and Abi knows she can’t talk, all she can do is nod, which will have to be enough for now.
‘Thank you. Thank you, Rosie.’ And as Abi steps out of the car into the syrupy light she hears Rosie cry out, angry, right before the car door closes with a thud, sealing Rosie and her misery away so her sorrow won’t muck up the clean Waverly air.
Abi makes roast chicken in milk with lots of bay and nutmeg, but Diego is, as always, late and the girls are hungry, so the three of them eat without him. Half the chicken is gone, and the girls are already talking about what flavour ice cream they’re going to have with their fruit salad when Diego enters the tiny kitchen, arms outstretched, holding a bottle of what Abi immediately recognizes as an excellent Sancerre.
The girls talk over each other, Margot trying to tell Diego about her new friend Luca while Lily asks him if he’d like to see her life drawing sketches and Abi tries to shoo them away, so Diego can at least take off his jacket.
He’s here, like a human blanket; Abi wants to wrap herself in him, safe from the world. She hadn’t realized until now how much she needs her friend, how different it is when they’re at work. In a restaurant kitchen Diego is focused, concise, unsmiling – a typical chef. But outside of work he laughs loudly and easily; everyone wants to be close to him.