Page 94 of The Summer That Changed Us

‘It’s Myles.’

Zoe wet her lips and cast her eyes sideways to meet Grace’s. They bulged with tears, but Grace didn’t feel sorry for her; it was all she could do not to grab her by the throat and shake her.

She stared at her sister, her heart splintering into pieces. ‘How could you do that to me, both of you?’

‘Please hear me out,’ Zoe began, her voice cracked with the effort of not crying. ‘What we did was wrong. I don’t deserve anything from you, but if you could just let me tell you what happened, I promise I’ll tell you the truth. After that, I’ll accept whatever you say, if you never want to see me again, fair enough.’

‘I’m listening.’

Grace’s heart was pounding, and she touched her hand to her chest to still it. If someone had told her she’d be able to feel such anger towards her sister, she wouldn’t have believed it.

Zoe pulled a tissue from a box on the coffee table and blew her nose. She was an attractive, bubbly woman who’d never been short of male attention. How could she have gone after the only man in the world who’d been strictly off-limits to her?

And Myles’s behaviour was sickening. Why Zoe? If he had to stray, surely he didn’t have to stray quite so close to home? It was cruel. Both of them were cruel.

As far as Grace had been aware, the two of them had always got on well; Myles was the big brother Zoe had never had. And in the absence of any other reliable man in her life, she’d idolised him. Myles for his part was fond of her in a brotherly way and had got on well with her son, Daniel. She had never, ever, had any cause to doubt that their relationship was anything other than it should be. Which just went to prove what an idiot she was. Oh, how they must have laughed at her behind her back …

Grace gritted her teeth. ‘I’m waiting.’

Zoe dabbed her eyes and exhaled. ‘Firstly, in all the years that you were with Myles, did he ever, ever give you cause to think that he didn’t love you? Did you ever catch him looking at another woman?’

Grace’s mind flittered backwards and forwards through years of memories. Almost all of them happy. He had been vocal about his love for her. His goddess, he’d called her. She’d never had reason to doubt him. She stopped her train of thought and gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Stick to the facts, OK? Just get on with it.’

‘You didn’t, did you?’ Zoe continued. ‘Because the only woman he ever wanted was you.’

How had he coped, how had he managed to carry on as normal and not say a word? All those times he and Grace had been to visit Zoe and the baby, his baby, and he’d not given anything away. She’d had no clue that anything had been, as Roger would call it, amiss.

‘So, can you please explain why my husband and my sister had an affair behind my back?’ Steel bands tightened around Grace’s chest; she was so close to giving in to her tears, but she strengthened her resolve not to break down.

‘I promised the truth. Ruby is his daughter. But we didn’t have an affair, we didn’t love each other, we got together once, completely unplanned, and hated ourselves for it immediately.’ Zoe’s eyes were pleading for understanding, Grace averted her gaze. ‘Myles barely spoke to me again after that, not for months.’

‘Until you found out you were pregnant, I suppose,’ she said flatly.

Zoe nodded. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I considered a termination, but then I kept thinking of the baby growing inside me. And I thought that I’m forty, I’d always wanted a second child and I might not get another chance so—’

‘So, you and Myles became parents.’

‘Technically. Although I told Myles I wasn’t expecting any input from him.’ Zoe’s voice faltered when she caught the look of contempt on her sister’s face. Myles had gone above and beyond his uncle duties with Ruby and Daniel. Now it was obvious why. ‘The guilt has been burning away at me ever since,’ Zoe added.

‘You managed to hide it well,’ she said bitterly. Her throat felt like sandpaper. She needed water desperately but there was no way she could get up to fetch some; she didn’t trust her limbs to hold her up.

Zoe had told them she’d had an appointment with the sperm bank over the Christmas period. Ruby came along in September. Realisation bubbled up inside her like a hot spring.

‘This one time was at Christmas, wasn’t it?’ Grace narrowed her eyes. ‘I asked you to help him deal with his anxiety over those prostrate tests. You were supposed to help him, Zoe, not have sex with him.’

‘I did help him,’ she insisted.

Grace shuddered, remembering what a difficult time it had been. The only time in their entire relationship when she and Myles had found it difficult to communicate. He’d been so scared of being ill. He’d read everything he could find on Google and frightened himself. He’d even joined a few online support forums for men with prostate problems. He automatically thought that every worst-case scenario would happen to him. ‘You helped him how, exactly?’

‘He came round, like you suggested, and I got him to talk. Everything came out, all the things which had been preying on his mind. He worried that he’d spent too many years of his life working and not enough living. He worried that he was so much older than you and that you’d end up being his carer and resenting him for it.’

Grace’s throat burned with sadness; she would never have minded looking after him. It would have been her pleasure. Why couldn’t he have said this to her, his wife? If only he had, none of this might have happened.

‘But the thing he was worried most about was … making love, or rather, not being able to.’ Zoe flicked a glance at Grace and bit her lip nervously. ‘He’d read that treatment could make him impotent. He was already mortified at the thought and worried that he’d disappoint you, let you down. I tried telling him that it was a really common condition and that millions of men experience it at some stage or other of their lives. I asked if he’d talked to you about it and he said he couldn’t and made me promise that I wouldn’t breathe a word. And I didn’t.’ Zoe dashed the tears from her face with the heel of her hand.

Grace got all of this. She nodded impatiently, waiting for Zoe to get on with the story. ‘Then what?’

‘And then he started to cry,’ she continued. ‘I think he’d kept all his worries pent up inside him and they all came tumbling out. So, I put my arms around him and gave him a cuddle.’ She looked up at Grace, her eyes pleading. ‘It started out innocently, I promise.’