Page 83 of The Work Husband

I could move back in with Mum.

I couldn’t move back in with Mum.

Thinking of her reminded me of the ring, but I didn’t mention it. That hurt too much.

‘Sam, there’s… I guess there’s something I need to explain to you.’

His hand resting lightly on Milton’s back, he looked at me. His eyes were full of compassion – all the guardedness I’d become used to seeing there gone.

‘Go on,’ he said.

‘I thought… I thought, when I met you – not originally, at uni, obviously, but afterwards. I thought I’d be able to figure out how to love someone. How to be kind and not worry about stuff I didn’t need to worry about and just – you know – be normal.’

Sam’s lips twisted in a half-smile that made me long to kiss him. ‘I’m not sure how many of us know how to be normal.’

‘You know what I mean, though. I thought I could fake it till I make it. I thought there was no way you and me would end up like my mum and dad, basically having a marriage that was a fucking war zone.’

He was looking at me now, properly listening.

‘And it turns out, I could – but only as long as everything was going well. The second there was, like, I don’t know, something – a bit of dust in the machine – I couldn’t any more. Because I didn’t know how.’

‘Ava was the dust in the machine?’

I smiled. ‘No disrespect to Ava. She’s told me a lot of stuff’ – there was no way I was going to bring up the Jamie issue right now – ‘and I think she’s an amazing person. I’ve realised how wrong I was about it all.’

I spread my hands out like the shrug emoji, and Sam nodded.

‘But yes,’ I went on. ‘I guess she was the dust in the machine.’

‘And I guess Jamie was for me,’ Sam said, saying the name I’d avoided saying. I wondered whether Ava had told him what I now knew, but surely she couldn’t have? ‘The same. I thought if I came clean with you about the Ava stuff, we’d be able to go back to where we were. But it turns out I was wrong.’

‘Jamie and I are’ – I swallowed some more of my wine – ‘we’re not friends any more. I’m not sure what’ll happen at work now.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Sam said, ‘but also, not sorry. You know what I think – I’m not going to bang that drum any more. You’ll figure it out.’

Would I? The knowledge that Sam still believed I’d kissed Jamie willingly made me burn with remorse, but there was no point in impassioned denial now.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess that’s what I’m going to have to do.’

Milton had slid off Sam’s lap now and was lying on his back in the space between us, his four paws in the air. Cautiously, Sam stood up, and gravity made the sleeping cat flop over onto his side.

‘I should pack some stuff and go,’ he said.

‘Okay.’

I managed to wait until he’d done rooting around in the bedroom wardrobe, filled up my wine glass and washed his up, and left before I allowed myself to start crying.

FORTY-ONE

It was a week before anything happened at work.

A week during which I sat down at my desk every day thrumming with tension, looking at Jamie’s face smiling smugly opposite me and wishing I could throw a brick at him. A week when I woke every morning still half-expecting Sam to be there in bed next to me, and then remembering that he wasn’t and never would be again. A week in which my mind ran over and over the same problems like a car with its wheels spinning on ice, getting absolutely nowhere.

Then, on Thursday, the solution came to me. I could simply… leave. I could hand in my resignation, call the number on the Walkerson’s flyer that was still sitting on the shelf in the hallway where I kept my keys, and put the flat on the market. I could email the agency that had found me jobs in yachting and go back to that. In as little as a couple of months, I could be somewhere else. Out on the ocean on the other side of the world.

I could run away, leaving all my problems behind me. It would mean leaving Milton, which hurt my heart to think about, but he would have a safe home forever with Sam. It would mean not being there to see Arthur grow up, but I’d send him photos and visit him when I was back in London on breaks. It would mean not being there for my father’s wedding, but I didn’t care much about that, and I suspected he and his new bride wouldn’t either.

It was simple – it was so obvious I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of it before.