There was a long silence.
‘Joel?’ She could feel panic rising. The twisting feeling moving from her stomach up to her chest then into her throat. Her pulse was racing. She wondered vaguely if she was going to pass out.
‘Look, I’m sorry, okay? I just needed some time away.’
‘Time away from what?’
‘From everything.’ There was another pause. ‘From you.’
‘Me?’ Jenna closed her eyes, the sense of dread all pervasive now. She could barely breathe. ‘What do you mean? What are you saying?’
She knew what he was saying but she had to hear it from him.
‘Look, Jenna, you know things haven’t been good between us for ages now. I need a time out.’
A time out. Like they were two kids, arguing over a toy. She thought of Hallie and Ada and tried again.
‘You have responsibilities. You can’t just?—’
‘This is what I mean! Life’s all about responsibility with you. You’re no fun. We don’t have any fun any more, Jenna. We haven’t for years, let’s be honest. We never go anywhere or do anything together.’
‘Because you’re always away at some work event or other!’ she cried. ‘You’ve withdrawn from this family almost completely.’
‘Well, there you go,’ he said casually. ‘Like you said, we haven’t been a family in a long time.’
‘I didn’t say that!’
‘I need space and time,’ he told her.
‘Well, I can’t give you a Tardis,’ she said bitterly.
‘You know what I mean. I’m going to stay with a friend for a while. I think it’s best. We both need to work out what we want and where we go from here.’
He was staying with a friend?
‘Louis?’ she asked suspiciously. Surely not. Louis and his wife were her friends, too.
‘No one you know. Someone from work. Look, I can’t talk now. I’m busy. I have things to do.’
‘But we have to discuss this!’
‘We don’t really have anything to say, do we? Like I said, I need space, so I’ve moved out and I’ll be in touch when I’m ready. Please don’t call me at work again. It’s very unprofessional to take personal calls during office hours.’
‘But you never answer your bloody phone! You didn’t even reply to my text message, and I know you saw it.’
‘Bye, Jenna.’
‘Joel, please, you can’t just?—’
There was no point in continuing. Joel had hung up.
Jenna stared at the phone in her hand in disbelief. That was it? Just like that? He’d left her and he hadn’t even had the decency to tell her he was going, or help her to explain things to the twins, or…
Or tell her the truth.
‘It’s Jenna.’
The secretary’s words came back to her. Why would she say that? Why wouldn’t she say, ‘Joel, it’s your wife’? Or even, ‘Joel, it’s Mrs Trent’. ‘Jenna’ implied a personal relationship. A closeness. An intimacy even…
