Page 61 of The Spare

Yeah.

It’s all super incestuous in this neck of the woods.

I’d be on edge tonight even if I hadn’t sat through bombshell after bombshell at supper, because it’s Xavier’s first formal outing with Ivy among our social circle. We may be in April, but the timing is still a little tight for my liking, and the narrative a little fuzzy. They’re planning to tell people that they met a couple of months ago, at a club in London, that it was love at first sight: this to explain the compressed timeline. Because even if they fudged it and said that Ivy was just staying with Xavier (rather than fully moved in and playing Happy Families), there are the indisputable facts that these two are now married and that Ivy’s sisters have been ensconced in Hartwell House since late February.

All of this is hard to explain away.

All of this undermines the public narrative Ben and I have crafted so carefully.

I remind myself that there’s nothing I can do, that it is what it is. Xavier can’t keep Ivy stowed away forever. We just have to brazen it out. Let people think she’s a rebound, if that helps them to square the Great Groom Swap with the fact that Xavier is now clearly smitten with a killer blonde who is just as clearly not part of our social set.

Let them wonder.

Never complain; never explain.

‘Benedict is on good form tonight,’ Minty remarks. It’s meant caustically, of course; it’s said caustically. She looks striking tonight in floor-length pillar-box red. Minty is of the Erin O’Connor school of beauty: tall, jet-black hair, features strong enough that one wouldn’t initially use the word pretty to describe her, but undeniably magnetic. Unfortunately, the world-weariness she cultivated so devotedly at school has warped into a low-level yet relentless sort of bitter bitchiness that constantly seeks out and locks onto external targets to replenish itself.

‘He is,’ I say airily, because nothing infuriates Minty more than being denied oxygen. But the truth is that she’s correct in her observation. That’s why it stings so much. Because if to Benedict was a verb, my husband would be Benedicting the ever-loving fuck out of this party. He’s on fire: moving and shaking and double-kissing and flirting. He’s every inch the guy I used to watch from the safety of the sidelines at every event we attended together, and you’d think the yearning would dissipate now that we’re married, now that I landed him, but it doesn’t.

It’s morphed, but, like all energy, it hasn’t vanished. How can it, when the target of all my attention is still the same guy, when that gold band on his ring finger hasn’t changed him a jot?

I stand with Minty and Annabel at the chic bar towards one end of the large drawing room and survey my new husband. He’s as popular with the women as ever. As affectionate with the women as ever. And for every woman who flirts less with him now that he’s taken, there’s one who flirts more. I bet there’s the odd one who thinks they’re in with a chance, that he can be tempted, who chooses to disregard the public declaration of love he made to the world’s press.

I bet there’s one who reads into his easy and, let’s be honest, probably innocent flirtation. Who believes, like I did on the dance floor at Xavier’s thirtieth, that maybe, just maybe, there’s something more to it. Who craves having Benedict’s eyes on her like I always have, because there’s something addictive about his attention. He has this way of making people—women, especially—feel as though they’re the centre of the universe when he’s with them.

A Benedict-ion.

God, I’m lame.

Back in the day, the yearning felt hopeless and delicious in equal measure: a forbidden crush, the brother I could never have.

But now, after all the machinations he, Xavier, and I have undertaken to save face, to steer the de Vere juggernaut clear of any unsolicited scrutiny, it feels exactly as I feared it would that midwinter day when he knelt before me and re-offered me the de Vere diamond:

Horribly, stupidly lonely.

Not all the time, obviously. Not when we’re alone, or we’re in bed, and he’s shining the warm, beautiful sunshine of his affection on me. Not when my body is wringing pleasure from his, when he makes me feel like the most desirable woman in the world.

Not then.

But at times like this, yes.

I thought that sunshine would continue in public, that the warm glow of ownership—entitlement, to make it sound less ugly, or smugness, to make it sound more so—would envelop me in situations like these, but it’s like watching my husband from behind a veil.

Notice me notice me notice me.

Come to me.

Don’t make me go to you, because I’m still paranoid that you won’t give me the warm welcome I need everyone to witness you giving me.

Jesus Christ. Needy much, Selena?

He’s talking to a girl called Imogen. She was, like, four years below me at school. She’s all over him like a rash, stupid little bitch.

Then he looks over at me.

Smiles.

Blows me a kiss.