An Unwanted Guest

Beverly watches Henry drop his good sweater in his chair by the fire and follow David to grab his jacket from the coat stand. Bradley provides them with a single torch, whose rechargeable batteries, he advises them, probably won’t last long. David takes it with them to the woodshed.

Beverly looks at the others – they all seem lost in their own worlds. She finds herself staring at her husband’s sweater on the chair close to the fire. She’s pretty sure his mobile phone is in the pocket. She needs to get his phone out of his pocket without these other people noticing what she’s up to.

She gets up and walks over and sits down by the fire. The sweater is beneath her. No one is showing any interest in her. She can hear, faintly, James and Bradley rattling around in the kitchen.

Beverly feels quietly around in the sweater until she finds Henry’s mobile phone and closes her hand around it. She slips it into her own pocket. She doesn’t want to look at it here, in front of everyone. And she doesn’t want her husband to come back in from the woodshed and find her in his seat.

She gets up and moves around restlessly, as if looking for a new magazine among the ones in the lobby. Maybe Henry won’t notice that his mobile is missing for a while. They’ve got the torch, and he wouldn’t be looking at his phone otherwise, since there’s no coverage. She only wants to see his old messages. If he misses it, he won’t have any particular reason to believe she has it. She has her own phone with the torch app.

She clutches it inside her pocket. She tells herself not to hope for too much; she has no idea what his password is.

Henry and David come in with their first armfuls of wood and drop them by the hearth. David tosses another log onto the fire. Sparks fly up in a shower and then he prods at it with the iron poker to get the fire going again. Then they leave for more wood. Her husband hadn’t even looked at her.

‘I’m going to go back up to my room for a bit,’ Beverly says.

Lauren suggests to Ian, ‘Maybe we should go up, too.’ She picks up her book from the little table at the end of the sofa.

It seems as if no one really wants to stay in the lobby any longer, Beverly thinks. They are already tiring of one another. She walks towards the staircase, eager to slip into the privacy of her room to see if she can access her husband’s phone. As she turns on the landing, she looks down and sees Gwen nudging Riley up, too.

It doesn’t take Beverly long to get to her room on the first floor, lighting her way with her own mobile phone. She opens the door with her key and closes it behind her.

She sits down on the bed in the gloomy room and pulls her husband’s mobile out of her pocket and looks at it. She’s seen him use his phone countless times. And he always does the same thing with his index finger – two quick swipes down, one across. Inspired, she tries the obvious, a capital H, for Henry. But it doesn’t work. She thinks hard about the last time she saw him using his phone and realizes he must have changed the password. He wouldn’t do that unless he has something to hide. She stares at the phone, frustrated. She tries different combinations of numbers but gets nowhere. Then she moves her finger in a capital T pattern, for Teddy, her husband’s favourite child, and the phone opens. For a moment, she’s exhilarated. She thinks what a fool her husband can be, and how frequently he underestimates her.

She quickly goes through his emails but there’s nothing but work emails, long and boring; if he’s hidden a mistress in there, she’ll never find her. Then she looks at the texts. She starts from the top of the list, ignoring names of people she knows, but then she sees a woman’s name she doesn’t recognize. She clicks on it and opens the text; there is a picture of her. Beverly’s heart almost stops. She starts at the bottom, with the most recent text, and works her way backwards.

Idk. I have to go away this weekend with the nag.

When will I see you again?

The nag. That is what he calls her to his girlfriend. A wave of hurt swells inside her. She knows she nags him and the kids. She nags them because they don’t listen. If they did what was expected of them the first time she wouldn’t have to nag. But the word nag also makes her think of an old, broken-down mare – whiskered, swaybacked, and ugly. She fights tears and continues reading.

I miss you terribly!

Do you miss me?

Attached to the text is a picture of her, topless, with a shameless grin. Beverly stares at the photo, shocked to her core. She’s young, and gorgeous. A home-wrecker. She knows nothing about life at all.

She can’t imagine what this girl sees in her husband. If she’s after money she’s going to be disappointed. He’s not going to have any left when she’s done with him, Beverly thinks furiously. And then she stops herself, takes a deep breath.

She’s not going to divorce him. Surely this is just a temporary infatuation, a midlife fling. He’s made a mistake. A mistake that they can recover from. She doesn’t want to lose him. She needs him.

She tabs up quickly through the rest of the texts to the beginning of the thread, anxious to see how long this has been going on. Only about a month. He met her at a bar.

She’s married to a cliché.

Well, now she knows.

Her finger itches to send a text of her own to this bitch. But she hesitates. And then she remembers there’s no coverage here anyway. Just as well. Finally she drops the mobile back in her pocket. She’s going to hurry back downstairs and slip it back into her husband’s sweater until she decides what to do. She must handle this the right way. She opens the door to the hall.

Chapter Sixteen

Saturday, 2:20 PM

MATTHEW SITS ALONE in his first-floor room, the lunch tray that Bradley brought on the side table untouched. He desperately needs to talk to his father, but he has no way to reach him. His father would know what to do. He’s always good in a crisis.

Matthew rises from his chair and goes restlessly to the window. He looks out at the icy landscape below. He can’t drive in that. He couldn’t possibly get back to New York City. And even if he could, how would it look – if he fled before the police arrived?

No, he’s stuck here. Waiting for the police.

Henry, drowsing by the fire, starts at a sound and opens his sleepy eyes. His wife is coming down the stairs, holding the rail until about halfway down, when she starts to make a wide detour to avoid Dana’s body at the bottom of the stairs. There’s a look on her face that makes him uneasy.

He knows his mobile phone isn’t in his sweater pocket. He doesn’t think he’s dropped it, and besides, he’s retraced his steps. It’s nowhere to be found. But when he sees the expression on his wife’s face, the realization hits him. She has it.

That can only mean that she suspects the truth about him and Jilly. He wonders if she was able to get past his password.

Christ, he thinks wearily, watching his wife approach. Maybe it will be better to have it out in the open. Now she’ll understand that she has to let him go. She’ll be bitter, at first, but he’s in love with someone else. Beverly has a good job. She’ll manage. It will be difficult for both of them – harder for her, of course – but he will get back on his feet, and life will be good again.

His kids might hate him for a while, but they’ll get over it. Both Ted and Kate have friends whose parents are divorced. It’s totally normal these days. Kids don’t even blame their parents for it any more – they practically expect it. They even work it, playing the guilt card, to get more stuff they want. He prepares himself as she sits down across from him, her serious face on.

Beverly’s heart sinks when she sees Henry sitting there, as if he’s expecting her. There’s no way she’ll be able to put his phone back. Very well. They have to talk about it sometime – it might as well be now. There’s no avoiding it. Maybe it’s for the best.

‘There’s something I need to say,’ Beverly begins, taking the chair across from him and pulling it a little closer.

Her husband gives her a particularly hard stare. ‘Did you take my phone?’

She looks down for a minute at her lap, gathering her courage, and then looks up again. ‘Yes.’