No. I cannot think this is real. This is not my home and I am not just the victim of a coma-induced delusion. This isjust another step on my journey and soon I’ll skip and I’ll go to find Tyler and we’ll figure this whole mess out. But there’s something in the sentiment that feels false. Like I’m kidding myself. I need more information.
But however much my brain wants to play detective, my body has other ideas. My condition regresses and I’m so tired I’m barely able to keep my eyes open for longer than a few minutes at a time. Every joint aches and my muscles keep cramping, causing a shockwave of pain so intense I’m forced to grit my teeth until it passes.
The next few days pass in a blur, until finally I wake up to find the sun streaming through the windows and manage to swing my legs out of bed without setting off a new wave of agony. I gingerly shuffle to the bathroom, each step tinged with anticipation. But I make it without issue and come face to face with a pale and thin woman staring back at me from the mirror. I look like shit.
A few minutes later there’s a rap of knuckles on the door of the en suite. ‘You’re awake,’ Nick says. ‘Finally.’ The way he says ‘finally’ makes it very clear I’ve been a millstone around his neck.
I crack open the door and look at him. I hate this man. I walk slowly back to the bed and get back in.
‘You’re feeling better?’ He doesn’t wait for me to answer. ‘Good. I might just pop round to Chris’s.’ He’s already heading to the hallway.
‘Okay,’ I say quietly from my cocoon. I have no idea who Chris is, but I’m assuming they play golf together and bitch about their wives.
He doesn’t reply, but a few minutes later I hear the click of the front door closing behind him. I wait for the sound of thecar backing off the drive and then wait a couple of minutes more. Just to be really sure he’s actually gone.
And then I muster all my strength to throw off the duvet and get to work. There must be something in this house that tells me who this Bethany really is. Who she is in herself. Not as Nick’s weird little wife who apparently gave up everything she ever was and ever could be for him.
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chris is not a golf buddy.
Well, actually she is. Just not the kind of golf buddy I was thinking.
She’s late twenties, slim, pretty. She looks … well, she looksperky. She even wears one of those visor things, her long blonde hair swept into a high ponytail. A walking cliché. She reminds me of someone, but it takes me a few moments to realize who. It’s her eyes that give it away, the exact same shade of blue as Felicity – Flick – Barnes-Schmitt’s.
It was a year before Nick and I broke up. A beautiful day, the sun high in a deep blue sky, not a cloud in sight. Only May so not yet too hot, the perfect weather for a pitcher of Pimm’s in a shady beer garden, a light cardigan on hand for when the sun drops below the horizon. The official reunion hadn’t been planned yet; this was just a couple of girls from school deciding to get together to catch up. Nick hadn’t been invited, but that didn’t stop him from gatecrashing under some thinly veiled pretence of coming to pick me up to save me getting the train.
I think I was glad to see him at the time, the whole thing had been a bit of a disaster if I’m brutally honest. Just a bunch of girls showing off to see who had ‘won’ at adulthood. They always did have a competitive streak and our school hadnever done anything to break that, maybe even encouraging it. On paper, twenty-three-year-old Bethany Raven was doing really rather well; her first master’s under her belt and well on her way to smash the MPhil she’d always dreamed about, bougie flat in a semi-nice area, attractive boyfriend with an Audi who bought everyone a round of drinks. And not cheap ones either.
But then he’d sat with us and started droning on about his favourite subject. Golf. A sport I’ve always found so utterly pointless and I struggled to contain my frustration about the tedious nature of his ‘anecdotes’. Felicity – Flick – had laughed at his jokes, if you can call them that, and touched his arm in a way I wasn’t overly keen on. She’d mentioned a sister who was a golf instructor somewhere up in Scotland.
Obviously Christina has moved at some point in the last seven years.
Moved to be closer to my husband?
I continue my hunt through the house and finally I find it. A notebook, tucked down the side of the bed, full of scribbles in handwriting so bad no one else would be able to decipher the words. It was my trick at school; writing so badly the teacher wouldn’t know what the answer was meant to say and then I could look up the right answer and convince her that was what the scribble said. Until I learned that actually studying was far easier and less hassle and I stopped the charade.
Luckily, this Bethany didn’t go on a writing course like one of the earlier Bethanys and so her handwriting is exactly the same as mine, the scribbles forming into coherent sentences in front of my eyes. It’s a diary. Well, kind of. It’s more of a journal detailing every move Nick has made, everyoutfit, every excuse, every work trip, for the last year. And the evidence against him is compelling.
Whatever suspicions the picture of Chris churned up, I wasn’t even close to sensing the sheer scale of his infidelity. Or just how blatant he is. Doesn’t he realize how smart we Bethanys are? How easy it would be for us to unpick his web of lies and get right to the heart of his deception?
Why didn’t she leave him? I mean, come on, we’re all thinking it. Why would a smart and fairly – even if I do say so myself – attractive woman put up with this kind of shit?
Nick has been gone for an hour. How long is a round of golf? Not that I think he’s actually playing golf, but I’m assuming that excuse gives him a certain window, one within which he has plausible reason to stay out. Two hours? That’s probably the minimum. I set an alarm for forty-five minutes and then start the next stage of my investigations.
He was always anally retentive, an obsessive hoarder of paperwork, all neatly organized into this folder he kept locked away in the bottom drawer of his desk. He never trusted keys and so he had this keypad lock, the four-digit number changed every month like clockwork. I do the maths from the date I last knew him to today. Seventy-three months. His code was 4572 back then. I scroll the digits to read 4645 and am met by a satisfying click. Anally retentive but also not all that bright. What’s the point of a code that’s so easy to crack?
He’s graduated from a folder to a full-blown series of suspension files, each one labelled with its contents for easy identification. It’s almost like he laid everything out for me. Snooping made easy. For a moment I appreciate the efficiency, until I remember that he’s a cheating bastard twat.
My finger lingers over the labels. Where to start?
We paid eight hundred thousand pounds – yes, I almost fainted too – for the house two years ago.
We share a mobile phone contract with EE.
The car is provided by Nick’s company. They also provide life assurance for both of us, a generous pension and a rather cushy thirty days’ holiday per year. Not including bank holidays. Nick is doing pretty well professionally. His payslip from March suggests he even got a nice chunky bonus.
There are no payslips with my name on them. I must access them via an online portal like it’s actually 2024 – most companies have been paperless for a decade.
