For Better for Worse

‘And your mother? How is she?’

‘She’s fine,’ Zoe told him.

Ben turned his back on her. His hands had started to tremble. He knew she was lying to him. Her mother had rung ten minutes after Zoe had left and from her conversation it had been plain that Zoe had not gone to meet her. Which left only one plausible explanation.

He could feel the emotions building up inside him: the pain, the anger, the sense of betrayal and loss… and most of all the helpless, aching intensity of his love.

It was no good. He couldn’t go on ignoring it, and perhaps after all this was what Zoe actually wanted—that he should take the burden of explanation and revelation off her shoulders and carry it for her.

He turned round to face her.

‘Zoe… is there someone else?’

Someone else…? Zoe stared at him in shock, immediately opening her mouth to deny it, and then she closed it again, recognising on a suddenly sharply illuminating and painful burst of truth what she had previously refused to admit.

There was someone else… someone who, with each day that passed, came more firmly between them, driving them apart, tearing her apart, tormenting her with conflicting emotions and loyalties… It was a strong fighter, this new life inside her, using every emotional power at its disposal to protect its frail hold on life, but her commitment had already been made and given long before it had even existed.

I can’t, she whispered silently in the shadows of her mind. I’m sorry, but I can’t…

‘Zoe…’ Ben pressed. The look on her face hurt him with its pain and confusion.

She focused on him, staring blankly at him for a second before telling him huskily, ‘No, Ben. No… there’s no one else. There’s no one else.’ She repeated more fiercely, ‘No one. There never has been and there never will be!’

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

‘So YOU’RE back, are you… ?’

Calmly Fern ignored the aggressive hectoring tone of Nick’s voice, carefully putting her case down on the kitchen floor, her mind absorbing the information that the kitchen sink was stacked full of unwashed things, the floor unswept and dusty, the table Uttered with the remains of not one but apparently several meals.

The air in the kitchen smelled stale and thick; she could smell the heavy unpleasant scent of Nick’s body… his aftershave, or was it just that after several days in an exclusively female environment meant her nostrils were too sensitively attuned to the maleness Nick exuded?

It was odd how a certain male smell, the right male smell could be so strongly erotic, while the same mingling of heat and sweat and musk from another man could cause almost revulsion.

‘Nothing to say for yourself? What the hell do you think you’re playing at, Fern? What was this disappearing act of yours supposed to prove?’

‘We need to talk, Nick, but first I want to unpack and get this mess cleaned up…’ She wrinkled her nose fastidiously. ‘Couldn’t you even have managed to wash up?’

Fern watched as shock mingled with anger momentarily silenced him, but it was only momentarily. Fern could see from the tension coiling his body; any moment now he would start, and once he had… She took advantage of his brief silence to add quietly, ‘Oh, by the way, I hope you’ve thanked Venice for returning your tie. It was very thoughtful of her.’

She looked him full in the face, refusing to let the rage she could see burning in his eyes bully her into looking away.

‘What tie? What the hell are you talking about? Just what did you mean by your note?’ he demanded, but the angry red tide of colour flushing his face had given him away.

Fern said nothing, simply turning away from him and picking up her case.

It was a new and very heady feeling, this sense of being in control, of having the advantage, of being the one to direct things… very, very heady.

She must be careful not to get too carried away, she warned herself as she opened the door and walked upstairs.

She was halfway up them when Nick came after her, bellowing her name.

She stopped and turned round, looking down at him, her expression mild and impassive.

‘I don’t know what the hell you think you’re doing,’ she heard him saying furiously. ‘You disappear for damn near a week on some crazy whim of that bitch of a woman you call a friend…

‘Do you realise I had to go out and buy myself a new shirt yesterday because I didn’t have a clean one to wear? You’re my wife, Fern. It’s your duty to—’

‘To what, Nick? To allow you to humiliate and manipulate me? To force myself to pretend that I’m happy? To pretend that this thing we call our marriage is anything other than a mockery and a farce… to stand quietly to one side while you have an affair with someone else?’ She shook her head. ‘You think those things are my duty, Nick, but I don’t. My real duty… my first duty is to myself, to maintaining my own self-respect, and I can’t do that any longer while I remain married to you.’