Page 84 of Between Us

He stepped backwards and sat down on the arm of the sofa. ‘Fuckingwow.Ten years together, and you throw it inmy face that we’re over five minutes before I go to Los Angeles. Now you repeat it, after going behind my back to check up on me and accusing me of fucking around. So it didn’t matter whether I was guilty or not? You’re still doing this?’

‘I’m sorry,’ Roisin said stupidly. It sounded awful, because it was.

‘Right, well,’ Joe said, after an agonising pause. ‘The paperwork on the apartment is done – I sent it back today. I’ll start looking for flats and packing my things up.’

‘I don’t want you to give me your share of this apartment. It’s insanely generous, but it’s too much.’

‘I gave you my word and I keep my word. It also means we don’t have to drag this out and get involved in interminable back and forth over selling it, solicitors, all that shit. I don’t want any of it. I want to go.’

‘OK.’

‘Well, I don’twantto go, at all. But.’

He gave Roisin a penetrating, sullen look. It should look like pure loathing, yet it was somehow a Rhett Butler stare that she feared could equally precede shouting or trying to kiss her. Like their initial showdown, it was as if Joe was finally interested.

A thought came to Roisin: that clear bell voice of her subconscious.Now he can’t have you, he really wants you.A tired love had become a sharp hunger again.

‘I’ll stay on at my mum’s to give you space,’ Roisin said.

‘Great.’

There was nothing to say as comfort that Joe wouldn’t throwback in her face. It was too soon, and quite possibly the only times that would ever be available were too soon and too late.

Roisin went to let herself out, feeling sick and foolish with how badly it had gone thanks to her rash accusations. It was as if she’d crashed into someone’s parked car when arriving to break news of a death.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

‘Is there anyone else?’ Joe said, as she opened the door.

‘What?’ Roisin said.

‘Oh, sorry, is this mistrust a one-way street? Is there anyone else you haven’t told me about?’

‘No, of course not.’

There was nothing else to be said.

She got into her driver’s seat with the lightheaded feeling of having made history, and not a good chapter. She’d known this day was coming now for a long time, but it was no less weird. Like the shock of a death after a protracted illness.It was slow, but fast at the end.

Like Ernest Hemingway said of going bankrupt, in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.

On a drive back in biblically torrential rain, Roisin asked herself how she’d travelled from the girl laughingly shrugging off the suggestion of infidelity to that counsellor months before, to the one covertly researching her partner. Perhaps Meredith was right; the decision to end was sufficiently momentous that she wanted objective proof that she should.

She pushed herself to find the deeper answer as she sat, engine idling in the early evening traffic, quiet tears running down her face as the windscreen wipers hypnotically,mechanically swipe-swiped. What was it aboutHunterthat had changed everything? Apart from the mere fact it involved sex and betrayal?

It was because by watching Joe’s onscreen alter ego, she’d become seized by the certainty that there were different versions of him, and she’d been living with only one of them.

52

Roisin didn’t tell Lorraine what had happened in the days following, nor did she receive anything from Joe’s parents or friends to demonstrate that he had. Roisin felt sure that Fay would’ve called her within an hour.

Joe had one brother, Grant, who was perma-single: Fay had always treated Roisin as her substitute daughter.

When she checked something on the iPad, she sawHunterepisode two still there, minutes to the end, last instalment unwatched. It was pathetically hilarious, how little she trusted herself to view it. Knowing she’d overreacted once, and predicting she might again, had still not created enough self-awareness to stop it happening. She had beclowned herself.

Also, her mother was in enough of a tizzy with the forthcoming fête. Roisin didn’t much fancy broaching her singlehood from her high-achieving boyfriend while anxiety about social status already ran high.

Lorraine would, as ever, put her own feelings first in her reaction.What about Roisin being on the shelf at thirty-two, what ifshe didn’t meet anyone as good as Joe, what about grandchildren, and, oh no, Grace and Imogen would crow!(If that sortof consideration was raised, Roisin couldn’t be sure she’d keep her temper.) Roisin would find herself reassuring her mother.

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