Page 70 of Between Us

You don’t have the latitude to mock my mother at the moment,she thought.

‘That reminds me. I was going to suggest …’ Joe said, dark eyes looking up from under his brow. A look that used to turn her stomach over when they were first dating. ‘We keep our troubles from our parents, for now. I want to tell them something definite.’

‘OK.’

Roisin didn’t offer that she’d told Matt, Gina and Meredith – fifty per cent of the Brian Club total – and she was slightly surprised he didn’t ask. Did he think nothing on their WhatsApp meant nothing had been said?

She was forced to conclude later, lying looking at the ceiling rose in the spare room, that when it came to their friends knowing, Joe didn’t care much either way.

44

Roisin had wondered if her abrupt change of heart regarding her mother’s personnel resources issue would register as odd to Lorraine. She had forgotten that not only was her mum not a woman to look a gift horse in the mouth, but she also wasn’t a woman to ask for the gift horse’s backstory or motivations in any way.

‘Thank God, I thought I was going to have to put a mop up my arse,’ Lorraine said when Roisin called to say that she’d move back for a bit, returning for social-life engagements in Manchester. ‘It’s not as if it’s easy to do a busy shift with two, even.’

‘You mispronounced “thank you”,’ Roisin said.

‘Thank you!I’ll grovel if that’s what you want.’

Roisin rung off and sighed. It was relatively easy to flee.

Joe, now full of lavish apologies for it, was once again cloistered in his study, wearing a headset mic as if he was giving a Ted talk, taking part in meetings about the meetings.

‘I’d bin these off so we could go to dinner tonight but there’s no binning these people unless you’re in intensive care. Even then, they’d probably ask what the hospital WiFi’s like.’

Roisin grimaced a smile, like she’d not heard that spiel before. She said, ‘Sure, it’s fine,’ and that she was going anyway.

On her drive out to Webberley, she asked herself again and again:Do you still love Joe? Is this a love of many years, on pause during a rough patch? Or is it former love?

Why does hewantto mend this?Every last person she knew would reply, ‘Because he loves you! Why wouldn’t he?’

During service that evening, she saw she had a missed call: Matt. She’d never felt dismayed to see his name before.

Roisin didn’t want to ring him back, but she also knew she’d be completely distracted until she did.

She chose a quiet moment to step outside the front. The Mallory was mostly gravel and space for parked cars outside, only four tables for customers, which were inevitably monopolised by smokers. The August air was balmy and blowsy, in that last gasp of summer way.

‘Hi, Matt,’ she said, tucking the phone under her chin as she picked up two foam-clouded pint glasses from the flower bed.

‘Hello! I went for a drink with Rick.’

‘That was fast!’ Roisin said, adjusting her phone again. ‘Thanks.’

‘Gardening leave means I have the time. I even watchedHunteras my homework. I don’t want to do any gameshow host ticking clock suspense here, so I would describe my findings as something and nothing, but ninety per cent nothing.’

Ten per cent of something startled Roisin. She’d declaredit possible and now, on the brink of it, she couldn’t allow that it was possible.

‘… Scarves being left behind rang no bells for Rick, and he didn’t recognise Joe.’

‘You showed him a picture?’

‘Yeah. I kind of had to. Did you not want me to?’

‘No, I … hadn’t thought what your inquiry would entail.’

That was exactly it. Adrenaline surged.Joe will never find out, it’s fine. Not gonna happen.If he did find out, could she justify it as payback forHunter? Point out how much turmoil she had to be in, to check up on him like this? She could try, but distrusting your partner this deeply wasn’t something you could easily come back from. It would change things between them. Did it not change things if she kept it to herself?

‘However,’ Matt said, as Roisin’s stomach pancake-flipped, ‘around two years ago, Rick tells me they employed this flaky Croatian girl called Petra. She’d disappear for long smoking breaks whenever she fancied – notorious for it. Apparently she got the nicknameFagatha Christiefor such disappearances. She told other waitresses she was seeing an older, married guy. They thought it was BS because she had no photos with him. She said she didn’t even know his real name to look him up. He was very low profile because of his job. You’d think “the wife” was more likely the reason, but …’

---