Page 99 of Forever, Maybe
When she woke three hours later, she had thirty blissful seconds of reprieve. Disoriented, she wondered why she was still dressed, what day it was and why the other side of the bed was empty. Then the events of the night before slammed into her like a freight train. Jennifer’s sharp voice, the venom in her eyes rimmed with thick black kohl and Danny’s look—pain, anger, betrayal—before he walked out.
She grabbed her phone and tried again. This time, the call went straight to voicemail. No ringing, no hope. The call log mocked her. Fifteen unanswered pleas. Her persistence had failed to wear him down.
He was shutting her out. Completely.
She waited until eight o’clock, when she knew Holly started work. “Is Danny there?” she asked, her voice shaking and thin.
“Oh, hiya Nell! You alright?” Holly’s cheeriness came from a normality to which Nell no longer belonged. She muttered “fine”, the best she could manage, and Holly offered to check Danny’s diary.
“He’s away today. Him and Joe are meeting some packaging people about the supermarket stuff. But you’ll get him on his mobile.”
She could hear the question there—Holly wondering why Nell hadn’t tried Danny’s mobile first. Nell thanked her and hung up. Danny didn’t want to be contacted and there was little she could do about it.
She paced the house, eyes staring out of the windows, unseeing. Upstairs in her bedroom, she’d found the bottle of CK One Daniel had given her two Christmases ago, dismayed when she’d grimaced upon opening the packaging. The perfume had always reminded her too much of Jamie, his body beneath hers, and those hideous three minutes shut in the toilet cubicle in Buchanan Galleries, waiting for the pregnancy test results.
She hurled it against the wall at the back of the garden, and then hosed the wall down, unable to bear the smell.
The day dragged on and on. She couldn’t work. She couldn’t eat. Finally, the front door opened just after eight o’clock. She’d been waiting for his return all day, but now that Danny had finally arrived, she wasn’t prepared at all. Her legs trembled, jelly-like, as she walked out of the living room.
He stood two metres away in the hallway, his eyes boring into her, and the bottom half of his face set in rigid lines. When she said nothing, he headed for straight the stairs. “I need to pick up some things.”
She found him in their bedroom. He had pulled out a suitcase—one of the larger ones—and was throwing in pants and socks, every drawer in the room wide open.
“Do you want to listen to what I have to say?”
He shook his head furiously. “No. All those times you used to pick him and take him to work, and vice versa and all those White Lightning nights out. Were you shagging him the whole time?”
Fear made her defiant. “No! You heard her. it was a one-night thing. You’d rather let Jenny Curtice have the last word, rather than me, the woman you’ve been with for twenty-two years?”
He straightened up, a shirt in one hand and trousers in the other.
“Aye, twenty-two years, eh? And it seems I don’t know you at all.”
The desolation was palpable. Nell gulped, pressing her hand to her mouth. She mustn’t, mustn’t cry.
“You do know me.” She dared not move any closer to him and they faced each other across the bed. “You do. I made an enormous mistake that was completely out of character, and I have lived with the consequences and the remorse ever since. But I don’t think the person who made that mistake tells the whole story about me, or the me you know and live with.”
“Lived with.” He tossed the shirt and trousers in the suitcase, before turning to the wardrobe and yanking out other items with a determined ferocity.
The words made her gasp. “Danny, please.”
The suitcase was almost full. “Please what? Forgive you for being a cheating bitch? First, you refuse to have kids and never give me a good enough reason for why. No, no. You insist we’re not having them, and you only change your mind when it’s too late.”
Wishful thinking on his part. She hadn’t changed her mind, but he barrelled on regardless.
“Then, I find out that you cheated on me with Jamie, Jamie Curtice—that weaselly, oily little prick. You say that you’ve suffered the consequences and the guilt. What, am I meant to feel sorry for you?”
He spat the last words out.
Her legs refused to hold her up any longer and she sat down on the bed. The conversation they hadn’t had since learning she was going through the menopause, and the animosity he clearly felt about her refusal to countenance children. “No, I didn’t mean it like that. I meant that I knew I’d done terrible things, and it’s bothered me a lot over the years. I’m very sorry.”
He zipped up the suitcase and hauled it off the bed, standing it on its side.
Swallowing hard several times, she forced herself to speak again. “I… I found myself pregnant afterwards.”
He froze mid-step, one hand gripping the doorframe. Slowly, he turned back to her, his eyes wide, his expression a mixture of disbelief and horror. “Pregnant?”
She could have kept the secret buried. It wasn’t as if it hadn’t already weighed her down for years, carving deep scars into her. But the gravity of this moment demanded honesty, no matter the cost. For once, the truth felt less like a burden and more like a release.
