Her husband was gone, she wasn’t going on holiday and now she was going to lose all their money, too.
4
Roar
Keep calm and be kind to yourself. Get dressed, clean your teeth and style your hair. Confide in close friends or a therapist if you need to. Indulge in self-pity in private, but keep your dignity in public and show your heartache who’s boss. Relationships can be like roller coasters with as many downs as ups. Things aren’t over until they’re over.
No matter what Ginny told herself, it wouldn’t sink in. Adrian’s dating-site image was seared in her mind. As the weekend progressed, questions raged in her brain. How long had he been active on the site? Why had he lied about his age? Had he met up with anyone? Were his late nights at The Vehicle Emporium really just work, and what did Miss Peach know? She felt terribly naive for missing any warning signs.
It felt like aliens had kidnapped her husband for a scientific experiment and removed the part of his brain that governed tact and decency.
She took a shower and let hot water bounce off her face. Afterward, she put on her dressing gown and rang the local independent travel company she’d booked the holiday with. She briefly explained her situation to a woman with a robotic nasal voice who took great pleasure confirming that if Ginny canceled, she would lose all her money.
“You could go on your own,” the woman suggested.
“Really?” Ginny threw a hand in the air. “It’s aromanticresort for couples.” She pictured waiters in the dining room exchanging pitying looks as they allocated her a tiny table next to the toilets. Other diners would whisper about her over their steaks.
“Please speak to your supervisor, to see if there’s any other options.”
The travel assistant sighed. When she returned to the call she sounded a little more amiable. “Apparently, you can change the name of your guest, or guests, for a small fee. You can switch your hotel to a different one, up to the same value. That’s all.”
An optical migraine brought dancing spots before Ginny’s eyes. She conducted a quick search and found there was only one other hotel in Vigornuovo available for three weeks in June. Hotel Splendido was much cheaper and nowhere near as posh as the Grand Hotel Castello Bella Vista, meaning she could afford five people to go on holiday rather than two. She felt too overwhelmed to look at other locations.
Ginny tried to think who she’d take with her instead of Adrian. Her married friends would probably spend the holiday secretively phoning their children and partners. The single ones would want to go out dancing and drinking. Ginny would most likely end up crying on a sun lounger after too many martinis and Adrian wouldn’t be there to hold back her hair. Phoebe was about to become knee-deep in confetti and Ginny didn’t want to tell her about Adrian’s misdemeanors. Her head was too achy to think about all this right now.
“You have forty-eight hours to amend your booking,” the travel assistant said. “Have a great vacation.”
Ginny trudged into the kitchen and automatically took two plates out of the cupboard. She looked in the fridge and asked herself why packets of pasta came in two-person-size portions. When she picked up a cup, it proclaimed,The World’s Best Husband.
She stared at it before lobbing it across the kitchen. It bounced off a wall and thudded down onto the linoleum where it lay intact. “I can’t even break a bloody cup properly,” she yelled, balling her hands into fists.
Ginny flurried around the house looking for evidence that Adrian might be having an affair. She didn’t discover anything, other than a silver stud earring and instructions for how to look after a new piercing in his bedside drawer. Seeing it felt like a kick to her bare shin, but she was relieved not to find anything more incriminating.
Adrian didn’t answer her calls and texts for the rest of the weekend.
On Monday morning, Ginny curled her ponytail and applied lipstick, telling herself the people of Greenham needed her, even if her husband didn’t.
Inside the Talk Heart FM building, the confident version of her in the poster looked like an imposter. The real Ginny felt bruised black and blue inside.
Tam had left a message to say she was going to be late into work, and Ginny was glad she didn’t have to face her. She would sort out her own show for the day. She sat down at her desk and texted Adrian.
Hi. Sorry but I can’t cancel the holiday, she messaged.
This time, he replied within seconds.Are you sure? Let me try.
Ginny ground her teeth. What could he possibly do that she couldn’t?
Send me the link, he added.
Ginny messaged him the holiday details. Let him try if he wanted to. She drank two cups of black coffee to give her an energy boost and scanned her emails to find some problems to address. The message she’d received last week nagged in her head.
You solve problems but never share your own.
Now that Adrian had christened her the Patron Saint of Problems, being authentic was more important to her than ever. Ginny had always prided herself on her empathetic abilities, but when she read through listeners’ issues that morning, she trulyfelttheir pain as if it was her own.
She cried for a man whose wife had left him for their next-door neighbor, and a woman who’d been unemployed for three years and was about to lose her home. Big, fat tears streamed down her face, joined by a river of snot, making jotting down any advice difficult. How could she help others when she felt so useless and hollow inside? She gulped another coffee and it made her feel a little high. She hadn’t been eating properly and her head was light when she took to the airwaves.
“Hi, and a very good Monday morning to you all. I hope you had a fabulous weekend,” she said, thinking how fake her cheeriness sounded. “I’m Ginny Splinter and you’re listening toJust Ask Ginnyon Talk Heart FM. Let’s all enjoy ‘Adore You’ by the adorable Harry Styles, then I’ll give you a helping hand with your issues.”
