What Alice Forgot

She shuddered.

Less than twenty-four hours till she saw Nick and the children and everything would finally fall into place.

The bathroom floor was becoming cold. She stood up and surveyed her tired, thin face in the mirror. Who have you become, Alice Love?

She walked back into the bedroom and considered trying to go back to sleep but she knew it would be impossible. Hot milk was the answer. Of course it wasn’t the answer at all. It never cured her insomnia, but the ritual of it and the feeling that you were doing something that the magazines always recommended for insomnia was soothing and helped pass the time.

The door to the spare bedroom was closed as she crept down the hallway. She had been pleasantly surprised to discover a spare room (previously one of their many junk rooms) all set up with a double bed, chests of drawers and spare towels. “Was I expecting someone to stay?” she’d asked Elisabeth.

“You always keep it like this,” Elisabeth had said. “You’re very organized, Alice.”

That hardness had come back in her voice. Alice didn’t know what it meant. She was starting to feel irritated by Elisabeth.

She crept down the carpeted hallway and nearly missed her footing at the top of the stairs, grabbing for the banister. Maybe it would be convenient if she fell and banged her head again. It might bring back all her memories.

She walked down the stairs, clinging to the banister. As she got to the bottom, she saw that there was a light on in the kitchen.

“Hi,” she said.

“Oh, hi.”

Elisabeth was standing at the microwave.

“Hot milk,” she said. “Want some?”

“Yes, please.”

“Not that it ever really cures my insomnia.”

“No—me neither.”

Alice leaned back against the counter and watched Elisabeth pour milk into a second mug. She was wearing a huge man’s T-shirt that must belong to Ben. It made Alice feel prissy in her long silk nightie.

“How are you feeling?” asked Elisabeth. “How’s your—memory?”

“Nothing new,” said Alice. “I still don’t remember anything about the children or the divorce. Although I’ve worked out it’s got something to do with Gina.”

Elisabeth looked at her with surprise. “What do you mean?”

“It’s okay, you don’t need to protect me,” said Alice. “I’ve worked out that he had an affair with her.”

“Nick had an affair with Gina?”

“Well, didn’t he? Everybody seems to know about it.”

“It’s news to me.” Elisabeth looked genuinely shocked.

Alice said nonchalantly, “He’s probably in bed with her now.”

The microwave bell dinged but Elisabeth ignored it.

She said, “I really doubt that, Alice.”

“Why?”

Elisabeth paused and then looked her in the eye. “Because she’s dead,” she said.

Chapter 18

Gina was dead?

“Oh,” said Alice.

She paused. “I didn’t kill her, did I? In a fit of jealous rage? Although I guess I’d be in jail? But maybe I got away with it!”

Elisabeth laughed in a scandalized way. “No, you didn’t kill her.” She frowned. “Are you saying you remember Nick having an affair with Gina?”

“Not exactly,” admitted Alice. It had seemed so clear. She brightened. That’s why everyone had seemed sympathetic when Gina’s name came up—because she was dead! There had been no affair at all! Now she was filled with relief and guilty love for Nick. Of course you didn’t, darling, I never really suspected you, not for a second.

And if there had been no affair, maybe Gina had been quite nice. So it was sort of terrible that she was dead.

Elisabeth took the mugs of milk out of the microwave and carried them over to the coffee table, switching on a lamp. The helium balloons that Dominick had blown up were still hovering silently. Two half-empty glasses of champagne sat on the windowsill, along with a pile of gnawed sticks from the chicken kebabs.

Alice sat cross-legged on the leather couch, stretching her nightie over her knees.

“How did Gina die?” she asked.

“It was an accident.” Elisabeth put her finger in her milk and stirred it around, avoiding Alice’s eyes. “A car accident, I guess. About a year ago.”

“Was I upset?”

“She was your best friend. I think you were devastated.” Elisabeth took a big mouthful of her milk and put the mug down quickly. “Ow! Too hot.”

Devastated. Such a big, sweeping word. Alice took a sip of her milk and burned her own tongue. It was so peculiar to think of being “devastated” by this strange woman’s death, yet apparently perfectly accepting of her divorce. She had no experience with devastation. Nothing that terrible had ever happened to her. Her dad had died when she was six, but she mostly just remembered a feeling of confusion. Her mother had told her once that Alice had worn an old jumper of her dad’s for weeks and weeks after he died and refused to take it off, kicking and screaming when Frannie finally pulled it off over her head. Alice didn’t remember that at all. Instead she remembered how at the afternoon tea after the funeral she’d got told off by one of her mum’s tennis friends for sticking her fingers in the cheesecake, and how Elisabeth had been doing it, too, even more than she was, but she didn’t get into trouble. Instead of remembering grief and devastation, she remembered the terrible injustice of the cheesecake.

There had been that night before her wedding when she had found herself crying in bed over the fact that her dad wasn’t alive to walk her down the aisle. She had been perplexed by the sudden tears and thought that maybe she was just nervous about the next day. She worried that they were fake tears because she thought she should feel that way, when in fact she couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to have a father. And at the same time she’d felt pleased, because maybe it meant part of her did remember her dad and did still miss him, and then she’d cried harder, remembering how whenever he was shaving in the bathroom, he’d squeeze a whole lot of delicious, creamy foam into her outstretched hands so she could smear it all over her face and wasn’t that cute and touching and she really hoped the hairdresser got her fringe right the next day because when she messed it up, she looked like a wombat—and there you had it, she was a horribly superficial person, actually more worried about her hair than her dead father. She had finally fallen asleep in a lather of emotion, which she didn’t know whether to attribute to her father or her hair.