He cared what I thought enough to hide the truth from me.
I don’t blame him for not telling me before now. We learn to future-proof our hearts, building a maze around them until they are almost impossible for others to find. I imagine myself becoming a mother to someone else’s little girl. I could do that, but deep down I still want a child of my own, my flesh and blood. I can tell Jack wants to change the subject, but I’m not ready to yet.
“Why doesn’t she still live with your first wife?”
He looks away briefly. “Because she died.”
“Oh, I’m sorry—”
“Don’t be, you weren’t to know. Cancer took her. She fought a good fight. Sometimes I wish she hadn’t, she was ill for a long time and it was hard. For all of us. It broke my heart, broke my everything actually, but I had to carry on for Lilly. We’re okay now.” His face changes, as though a filter has been applied to my view of him. “By the way, your agent called. He said you need to call him back, urgently.”
“My agent called you?”
“Yes, he said you weren’t answering your phone.”
“But how did he know I was with you?”
Jack frowns. “Darling, do you ever check Twitter? Facebook? The news?”
“Not if I can help it, no…”
He walks back into the lounge and picks his phone up from the coffee table, tapping it a few times before holding it in my face. He’s opened the TBN app, and there I am, headline news, again, along with a photo of me embracing Jack on his doorstep less than an hour ago.
“Did you tell her I was here?” I ask.
“Not guilty this time.” He looks a little hurt. “I am sorry about that. I made a terrible mistake a few years ago, did something I shouldn’t have when my first wife was ill. It was such a dreadful business, watching her fade away. I was dealing with it all on my own, and I’m not making excuses, but I was scared and so … lonely. Jennifer Jones knew about what I did and threatened to spill the beans; she’s been blackmailing me ever since. If I’d felt like I had any choice, I would never have done what she asked, and you have my word that nothing like that will ever happen again. If I hadn’t let her into your dressing room that day, and then sent her the pictures of us, she would have destroyed me. Not just my career, my relationship with my daughter too; I can’t have Lilly read about what I did online one day, she’d never forgive me.”
“You slept with someone else when your wife was ill?” I guess, hoping that I’m wrong.
He stares at the floor. “Yes. There’s really no need to look at me like that, we all make mistakes when we are under enormous stress and strain. I was drunk, emotionally exhausted, it meant nothing.”
“Who did you sleep with?” I whisper, not sure I want to know the answer.
“She had a tiny part in the film I was in, it was so stupid, but life at home was so hard and—”
“Who?”
“Jennifer Jones. That’s how she knew I’d cheated on my sick wife, because it was with her. Maybe she thought I could help her nonstarter of an acting career, I don’t know, but I couldn’t do that, and I couldn’t see her again either. I knew it was a mistake at the time, but I didn’t know it would haunt me for this long. She gave up on acting shortly afterwards and became a showbiz journalist, but she never gave up on getting revenge for our one-night stand.”
The revelation makes me feel a little sick. I don’t like the idea of Jack sleeping with anyone, not that I have any right to think that way, but Beak Face, of all the people. No wonder she hates us both so much. Something else occurs to me, interrupting my revulsion.
“If you didn’t tell her that I was here, then how did she know?”
He shrugs, and we both stare down at the latest Jennifer Jones headline:
AIMEE SINCLAIR BACK IN THE ARMS OF HER LOVER AFTER BEING CLEARED OF HUSBAND’S MURDER
Fifty-eight
Maggie arrives home, barely able to remember any of her journey from the clinic. Coming back to a cold, empty flat after news like this is far from ideal, but she doesn’t have anyone she can call. At times like these she wishes she had some sort of pet for company; she has always preferred animals to people, animals know what they are. She feels smaller than she did before. As though having the fragility of life thrown at her this way has made her shrink a little.
She’s hungry, but she can’t eat, not now. She suspects that knowing the end is coming is worse than the end itself. Her parents didn’t know when their time was up, and she wonders what they might have done differently if they had. The answer is one word, and she believes it to be true: everything. When things don’t look right, sometimes you just have to change your perspective, she thinks to herself, then reaches a more positive conclusion:
This death sentence is an opportunity to fix things before it’s too late.
She decides to eat after all, knowing she’ll need her strength to make this work. The fridge is practically bare, so she makes beans on toast. “Nothing wrong with that, packed with protein,” she mutters to herself, while stirring the orange contents of the saucepan.
Once she has eaten, she lights the fire. It will help to warm the place up, and she should probably start burning all the things she doesn’t want anyone else to find when she is gone. In her hurry, she forgets to put on any gloves before picking up a piece of wood and gets a splinter in her finger. She tries to get it out with a pair of tweezers, but it snaps in half, leaving most of the fragment still buried beneath her skin. She ignores the pain and strikes a match, lighting a small bundle of newspaper and kindling, watching the worthless words written on the paper smolder and burn. She unexpectedly finds herself smiling. Life might have moved the goalposts when she wasn’t looking, but she’s confident that if she adjusts the plan and her aim just a little, she can still win the game.
Maggie has some regrets, but doesn’t want to share them, not even with herself. When you’ve spent your whole life living a lie, it can feel a little late to start telling the truth. She checks her emails, then checks Aimee’s; she knows all her passwords. She can also see exactly where she is, thanks to the phone tracker app she installed on Aimee’s mobile. She just knew that Aimee and Jack Anderson were having an affair. She imagines him fucking her right now and squeezes her eyes shut to try to delete the image. Slut. Maggie has tipped off a journalist and is pleased to see that the story has already been published online. Jennifer Jones has come in very handy indeed so far.
Maggie closes her laptop and sits quietly in front of the crackling fire, trying to silence the thoughts that seem so loud and profound to her now. Perhaps it’s the clarity of knowing that her journey is coming to an end. She looks around the room and concludes that her life hasn’t amounted to much. Her eyes come to rest on the pile of unopened mail sitting on the coffee table: white paper rectangles, with tiny plastic windows revealing her name.
Maggie O’Neil.
Except it isn’t really hers.
Knowing a person’s name is not the same as knowing a person.
She’s used that name for so long now, sometimes she forgets it was secondhand, borrowed, stolen. She wonders if perhaps Aimee feels the same way too. Maggie stares into the flames and starts to think she has more in common with other people than she previously believed. We are born alone and we die alone, and we’re all a little bit afraid of being forgotten.