Page 61 of The Woman Who Said Yes

‘Yes,’ I concede, ‘and I guess he didn’t exactly commit a crime.’

‘Maybe not. But you trusted your instincts and I don’t think that’s ever a bad thing.’

Hmm, I hadn’t when it came to the Superdrug gift card, but I let that thought fly away. ‘I’m glad you think so,’ I say truthfully, and we stroll in companionable silence until my block comes into view. I let us into the flat and make us tea, and we sit drinking it at my kitchen table. As the talk turns naturally to Jake and Marnie, it strikes me that I can’t remember the last time we hung out together like this, just the two of us, without the buffer of the kids.

How can it be that something seems so normal and right, and yet so weird at the same time? It is strange, to be sipping tea with Phil in my kitchen – perhaps because I spent so long hating him. Wondering how one used a sex swing exactly, and willing a freak accident on him, where he’d flip back and become hopelessly tangled at the crucial moment, and somehow the rope would knot itself around his cock and the emergency services would have to be called.

How it cheered me, the thought of Phil’s petrified face as a paramedic wielded some razor-sharp implement in order to cut it off! Not his penis. Just the rope.

I nurtured other fantasies too: of him eating a rancid mussel when he was on holiday with Gina in the South of France, or somehow tumbling off Blackfriars Bridge on his way to the office and being snared up by a speedboat and dragged out to sea. Here with him now, I’m relieved that the company he works for hasn’t invented a smart mirror that can show the world the inside of my head.

And of course, I never wanted any of those terrible things to happen, not really. Even through the very worst of times, I never did. Because he was still Marnie and Jake’s dad, and although they were horrified by his affair, they never stopped adoring him. As Jake once put it, ‘He just fucked up for a while there, Mum. Stupid idiot.’

Phil places his empty mug on the table. ‘I’m really sorry,’ he murmurs.

‘What about?’ I ask, startled.

‘The wedding. This whole business with Eva⁠—’

‘Oh, yes,’ I say quickly.

‘It’s such a shame.’

‘It is.’ Somehow, because I feel calmer now with him being here – at least, with not being alone – I manage to raise a smile. ‘You know what? It was going to be the debut outing of my cape.’

‘You bought a cape?’ Phil looks astonished.

‘I did!’ He nags me to go and get it to show him, and I return with it draped around my shoulders. I actually model it for him in my kitchen, over my old washed-out T-shirt, and he doesn’t say it’s ‘different’ or ‘brave’, but ‘really elegant’.

‘Elegant?’ I’m laughing now. ‘You sure?’

‘Honestly. You’re looking really good, Andie,’ he adds, and I know he doesn’t just mean because of the cape.

The late afternoon has turned golden and, as sunlight fills my kitchen, Phil is showing no sign of going home. In fact, it seems that he wants to make himself useful here. ‘God, Andie – that loo seat,’ he announces on his return from the bathroom. ‘Nearly threw me across the floor!’

‘It’s been like that for ages.’ I sense him studying me in his old infuriating way; bemused, veering on patronising. Like the way he used to rib me about my silicone cake moulds, and how I’d give up on Duolingo after a couple of weeks. ‘I’ll fix it,’ I add defensively. ‘It’s only a couple of screws, I think. It’s not difficult⁠—’

‘Didn’t your dad have a look at it while they were here?’

‘Oh, so it’s only men who are capable of mending toilet seats?’ I say sharply.

Phil laughs. ‘I’m only saying!’ Then Jake phones to check if I’m okay, and I wander around the flat as we chat, adding that his dad’s here.

‘Really? That’s nice!’ he says in surprise. By the time we’ve finished the call I discover that a small miracle has happened, and my malevolent loo seat has firmly reattached itself to the porcelain part. I decide to say nothing about it.

Hungry now, Phil and I head out for an early dinner at a local Vietnamese. ‘Can I leave my car at yours and come back to pick it up tomorrow?’ he asks.

‘Of course you can,’ I reply, deciding that it’ll be more fun if we can enjoy a drink together. We over-order, just as Marnie and I always do here because everything is delicious. We also drink more than we should, which our daughter and I don’t do as she is a moderate Gen Z-er. Yet it feels natural and normal for Phil and me to be sitting together at a small Formica table at the window. So natural, in fact, that I almost forget about Dom, and the wedding, and prowling around an overgrown garden in a search for something that wasn’t even there.

‘A weird thing happened today,’ I announce as our plates are cleared.

‘Oh, what’s that?’ Phil’s brows shoot up.

I sip my wine and tell him about the mysterious toilet seat fairies, and that I’d like to thank them very much. It strikes me that anyone glancing in would assume we are just a normal couple as he smiles and says, ‘I’m sure it wasn’t any trouble at all.’

After dinner, as we take a meandering route back to my flat, my head floods with memories of when I first moved to London with my crimpers and all those tins of prunes. My first place was a house share in Hackney, just half a mile away from here. It wasn’t the Hackney of now, all artisan bakers and fancy delis and coffee with tasting notes. There were gloomy pubs and ramshackle shops and a dodgy cab company which, fearless back then, we all used regularly – despite the fact that one of the cars had a gaping hole at the footwell of the passenger seat, so the person unfortunate enough to be sitting in the front could actually see the road.

I’d secured the room via an ad in The Evening Standard and became firm friends with my housemates – Cheryl and Zita and Lynne. At one point they all had boyfriends, and Mum’s enquiries about whether I’d ‘met anyone nice yet?’ had begun to spike me a little. Then I’d met Phil. Thank God for that! was Mum’s tone when I’d told her. She’d sobbed tears of relief throughout the entirety of our wedding.