She felt the ground shift beneath her as she watched her go. It wasn’t her. She hadn’t been wary because she was frightened, meeting her on her own in the street. She’d been wary of being approached by a rambling lunatic. She hadn’t even recognised her.
It wasn’t her. Then who?
Cassie’s stomach turned over as she realised she knew.
Forty-Six
Cassandra
Relieved that Adam appeared not to be home, Cassie pushed through the front door and dumped her overnight bag on the hall floor. Picking up the post, which he clearly hadn’t bothered to do, she tossed it on the hall table and headed for the kitchen. She tried to leave the bag where it was, but couldn’t. Her compulsion to put her clothes in the wash and tidy her toiletries away, making sure everything was in its proper place, was too strong. She needed to get her life back in order.
Swallowing the tight lump clogging her throat, she stepped back and picked up the bag. She was growing tired, weary with her own obsessive behaviour. Had she actually created the very situation she’d always dreadedbeforeKim had appeared? Had she been so sure Adam would leave her one day that she’d ended up pushing him? That was the thought that had been nagging her as she’d driven here. Now that she’d established – or at least thought she had – that it wasn’t the woman from her past sending the texts, was it possible that she might somehow be able to salvage her relationship?
She’d accused him of sleeping with Kim. The Adam she knew before their lives had fallen apart would never have cheated on her. But now… She was as certain that Kim was coming on to him as she was that it had been her sending those texts. He couldn’t fail to have noticed. Could he? She had to ask him outright, talk to him calmly, not rant like some demented witch. She would have to apologise, whatever her suspicions. If hewasattracted to a woman so much younger than she was, a prettier woman with flame-coloured hair, then she might be fighting a losing battle, but she would fight. Adam had been her whole life. She loved him. Would love him until the day she died. She needed him to know that.
Heading up the stairs, she tried to work out what she would say to him. Where to start to explain the terror gnawing at her insides, the voice in her head that constantly told her she was about to lose everything. That she deserved to.
Going into the bedroom, she ran a hand through her hair, which needed a good wash, and was reminded how short it still was. Cursing herself for being obsessed now about her appearance, she walked towards the bed. She was about to drop her bag onto it when she hesitated. Something didn’t feel right. Her gaze travelled over the Egyptian cotton duvet cover and her heart lurched.
The appliqué frill was at the bottom of the bed. The duvet was on upside down. She tried to think rationally above the panic mushrooming inside her. Adam had slept in it, obviously he had, and hadn’t made the bed properly. Her hand went to the indent in his pillow. But why was there an indent in the other pillow?Herpillow?
Her mouth ran dry as she spotted the evidence of what she already knew. Her heart rate quickening, she stared stupefied for a second, and then plucked it from the pillowcase and dangled it between her thumb and forefinger. One long flame-red hair.
She snatched the pillow up, nausea rising like corrosive acid inside her as she pressed it to her face and breathed in a perfume that wasn’t hers, floral, musky, warm and sweet, the smell of another woman. Would he tell herthiswas all in her mind? Her world crumbling, she stood rooted to the spot, recalling the smouldering anger in Adam’s eyes when he’d told her she was imagining things. The disillusionment. She’d tried to convince herself he was right. She’d sensed the sexual charge in the air when Kim had been around him, felt it, yet she’d doubted her instinct, doubted her sanity. Sloped off like some spurned woman, allowing them to carry on behind her back, undoubtedly aroused by the illicit thrill of it. Right here. In the bed she and Adam shared together. Had they talked about her? Laughed at her whilst lying together in their post-fucking afterglow? Raw with pain, with the knowledge that this nightmare she’d been living was indeed her reality, she wrapped her arms tightly around herself, a primal moan escaping her as she rocked to and fro.
How could she have been sostupid?
Anger and humiliation rising hot in her throat, she clutched hold of the corner of the duvet and, summoning the last vestiges of her self-esteem, tore it from the bed. She didn’t know whether to be more insulted by what he’d done, right under her nose, or by the fact that he would think she wouldn’t notice. Perhaps he wanted her to. Knowing her as he did, surely he would have been more careful if he’d wanted to cover his tracks. Plainly he didn’t care.
Her chest heaving, she grappled for the fitted sheet and attempted to pull it from the mattress, catching a fingernail in the process, tearing it to the quick. The pain was excruciating, the droplet of blood stark against the pristine white of the sheet. Blood from the wound of her marriage that had opened the day she’d lost her baby.
Trying to oust the images from her head – her husband and the mother of her grandson grinding and moaning inherbed – she bundled the duvet and sheet into her arms. Carrying them along the landing, tripping over them as she went, she heaved them higher and, almost blinded by the tears cascading down her face, picked her way carefully downstairs.
She was passing the open lounge door when she saw them. The photograph albums, stacked on the coffee table. Images of their life together, a happy life, she’d once thought, her life with her son. Why would he have fetched them from the loft now? He would hardly have been going through them, his heart breaking, when he didn’t give a damn about his marriage, about her. He clearly didn’t care about Josh either, if he was sleeping with the mother of his child. Drinking wine with her. Cassie’s blood turned to icicles in her veins as she noticed the two washed wine glasses on the plate rack in the kitchen. She went to the fridge and found an open bottle of white wine. Adam didn’t drink white wine. Kim did.
Stultified, she carried on to the utility room. Placing the bedding on the floor, opening the washing machine door, she wondered what temperature to choose. Forty degrees? Or thirty, bearing in mind the environment? Or sixty, considering how soiled they would be?
Sixty, she decided, reaching for the washing capsules.
A ragged sob rose inside her. She couldn’t do this.Couldn’t.She pressed a hand to her mouth, sinking to her knees on top of the Egyptian bed linen. Kim was stealing her husband, her life and her memories. Cassie tried to stop the choking sobs, but still they kept coming, racking her body. Sobs for her stolen babies, who’d never breathed independently of her; for her beautiful son, all grown, yet still such a child; for her husband. She cried until she thought her heart must surely break.
Hergrandson… they would steal him from her too.
No. She would not let that happen. She would notallow Adam and the whore who’d slept with her son and her husband to do this to her.
Grasping the washing machine door, and then the work surface, Cassie pulled herself up, straightened her shoulders and tried to stand tall. She would do their dirty washing. In public. She would stop them.
It would scorch the lawn, she realised, heaving the bed linen outside. Her pretty garden, which she tended so meticulously, would be scarred. But she didn’t care. Her mother had been right: this was a far more satisfying way of cleaning up the dirt and mess her husband had created. Her anger growing steadily, she went back to the kitchen and found the matches she kept in a drawer to light the candles at Christmas. They wouldn’t use them again now. There would be no more family Christmases. No more family.
Plucking the matches out, she banged the drawer shut and headed to the lounge, fuelled with purpose. She scanned the drinks cupboard and then grabbed the cognac – Courvoisier, Adam’s tipple of choice when he was celebrating or stressed. He would certainly be stressed when he realised that though it was he who had destroyed their marriage, she was the one who was lighting the funeral pyre.
Forty-Seven
Cassandra
Flames dancing in her eyes, Cassie watched the bed linen burn, waited to feel the thrill of satisfaction. There was nothing. Nothing but a hard rock in her chest. She watched a while longer, her arms wrapped tightly about herself, the warm glow of the fire scorching her cheeks but doing little to force the chill from her bones, and then went back to the kitchen for the bleach.
Hurt and anger burning inside her as surely as the fire outside, she went back upstairs into the bedroom and stood over the bed. It was a good bed, comfortable. It contoured their bodies perfectly, Adam had once said. Hadshelain in his embrace? Had he pulled her close to his midriff, her body fitting perfectly with his?
