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  “Jess.” His hand slides onto my bare arm, the heat from his touch making goose pimples bloom on my skin.

  “Yes?”

  My pulse thunders in my ears as he leans towards me for a kiss. As his lips touch mine, I realize how much I don’t want to mess this up. I want to be cool and seductive and for him to find me as attractive as he seems to think I am.

  I also realize I’m thinking so hard about this that I risk slobbering all over him, so I make a conscious effort to relax my shoulders. To remember to enjoy the feel of his mouth against mine.

  I’m concentrating on all this, when I become vaguely aware of the chatter of small voices somewhere outside. I don’t give them a second thought at first, and even when the giggles start, the most I ever contemplate is the possibility that someone’s enjoying a lively game of boules.

  Then there’s a knock on the window, and Charlie and I leap apart, registering half a dozen children clamoring to see into the car.

  It’s then that I hear another grown-up voice. It’s vaguely familiar. “Les enfants! Children! Come away!”

  As Simone bends down and we eyeball each other through the glass, it takes a second for me to register the change in her expression when she realizes it’s me. The look on her face is not quite one of satisfaction but relief.

  I know exactly what’s behind that look. Because I’ve been there myself.

  Chapter 40

  When I was Adam’s girlfriend, I was kept on my toes. It wasn’t that he was constantly sleeping around; simply that, when your heart is hopelessly lost to someone, fear is an unfortunate side effect. Worry that one day all those girls who can’t take their eyes off him, the ones prettier and probably funnier and cleverer than you, will finally turn his head.

  In the early days, he’d made me feel great about myself; taller, slimmer, so witty and enchanting that I could be talking about grouting the bathroom tiles and he’d still be listening intently, gazing at me with those dark, infinite eyes.

  How we went from there to the mess we became was complicated yet also straightforward: things change.

  Although our troubles had started as soon as I found out I was pregnant, the thing that really changed us forever was the night of William’s birth. Before then, I remained convinced we’d work everything out between us. Afterwards, I knew we were doomed. I knew it the moment he walked through the door in the hospital and failed to answer my questions with any conviction.

  “Where were you?”

  Mum had excused herself to get a coffee from the hospital vending machine, and by this stage, I was beyond being nice.

  “Okay. The thing is . . . I was with Jules.” His colleague. “It turned into a late one. I lost my phone . . . and I only realized what had happened when I found it again.”

  “You weren’t with Georgina?”

  “Oh God, no,” he said, as if the idea was ridiculous.

  “So why are you covered in her lipstick?”

  His hand shot to his neck. “That’s not . . .” He drew breath but ran out of the energy to continue almost immediately. “Okay. We bumped into each other.”

  I looked at him incredulously. “Am I seriously expected to believe that? That of all the bars in Manchester, you and your ex-girlfriend just happened to be there at the same time?”

  He shifted about from foot to foot, his eyes darting anxiously, unable to meet my gaze. Of all Adam’s talents, deception is not one; he is truly awful at it.

  “Okay, fine,” he said, sweat beading on his brow. “She’d been phoning me for days after she’d split up with that guy she’d been seeing, Johnny. So I arranged to meet her at the Bush Bar.”

  “Then why did you lie to me?”

  “I didn’t! Well . . . okay, I kind of did.”

  “So what about the lipstick?”

  He swallowed. “I was giving her a . . . supportive hug.”

  I held my hand over William’s tiny ear. “Did she give you a supportive blow job in return?”

  “Jess, don’t be like that,” he spluttered.

  “What do you expect when you turn your phone off for twelve hours when I’m giving birth to your firstborn son?”

  He just kept banging on that I should trust him, believe him that Georgina went home alone—and he got sidetracked at his friend Jules’s place. I might have been off my head on pethidine, but I hadn’t totally lost my marbles. This was confirmed when I bumped into Jules’s wife, Suzy, on my first trip to the supermarket after I’d left the hospital. She’d done the obligatory cooing over William, when I said casually: “So . . . did Jules have a late night at the team-building day? I know a few of them were out until the next morning.”

  She shook her head. “Jules is a lightweight, Jess. He got home at twelve thirty and was snoring away next to me within five minutes.”

  And so I knew for sure: Adam was lying about that too.

  I’m not a churchgoer, but I’ve always believed in the power of forgiveness. I’m not the kind to bear grudges or refuse to let things go; I don’t want them to eat me up from the inside out. But how can you forgive someone when the deception never stops? And it didn’t, until Adam couldn’t even be bothered lying about that night any longer. He just said I’d “got it wrong,” refused to talk about it and that was supposed to be that.

  We stayed together for two months and two weeks after William was born, and those days, when we were supposed to be bonding as a family, were among the most wretched of my life. That wasn’t all Adam’s fault.

  I might have fallen head over heels in love with my new baby, but he was not an easy newborn. He was gorgeous but demanding, constantly unsettled, fussing and uninterested in feeding unless it was between the hours of midnight and five in the morning. It goes without saying that there were moments of pure happiness, when I’d wrap him up after his bath and snuggle him into me, or simply marvel at the velvet skin on his tiny hands. But there were also times when the lack of sleep and crushing exhaustion felt like it was never going to end. I blamed myself for the fact that William was not the gurgling, contented bundle of joy I’d assumed he would be. I was certain I must’ve been doing something wrong, despite having read every parenting manual going.

  While Adam went back to work after a brief paternity leave, I stayed at home looking after William, pumping milk like a Friesian cow and stewing in my own despair. I was physically wrecked, riddled with mastitis and so far from the definition of a yummy mummy that I felt like burning my trendy baby sling.

  I craved Adam’s presence throughout the day but was irritated as soon as he strolled in through the door and I was reminded of what he’d done. A couple of friends asked me at the time if I had the baby blues, and maybe I did. But there was more to it than that, and worse was to come.

  At the height of all this, Mum finally told me that those funny symptoms she’d had for the last few years amounted to something distinctly big and unfunny. To say I was crushed doesn’t come close to conveying its impact on me. I was devastated. I couldn’t see straight. I was dizzy with the enormity of my feelings, the idea that my life was running away with itself, in a direction I couldn’t possibly manage.

  In this cauldron of stress and misery, my tolerance for Adam’s bullshit was at rock bottom. So maybe I did have the baby blues, but I almost certainly had the mum blues and the Adam blues too, caused by the fact that I had started a family with a man I knew had done the dirty on me and wasn’t capable of being the pillar of strength I needed.

  Despite that, on the day I told him I wanted to split up with him, I’m not entirely sure I meant it. I don’t even recall what prompted the particular row we had that day. But I do remember being gripped by a scalding fury, as if all my fears and resentment and anger at the way he’d behaved were suddenly concentrated into that moment.

  “You don’t deserve to be William’s father,” I told him. “You’re just
not up to this job. The longer time goes on, Adam, the more convinced I am: everyone would be better off if William and I just left.”

  I stood there, with those bleak words hanging between us in the very flat where we’d once shared so much intimacy and love. With hindsight, I’m fairly sure, naively, that I wanted him to man up and beg me to stay. I’m not sure why I thought I’d win that gamble, but I was too exhausted to think my actions through clearly.

  He didn’t even argue. “Okay,” he said simply. “If that’s what you want.”

  I packed a bag and went to Mum’s house, feeling numb, gritting my teeth, grinding down my devastation. I cried all night as I lay, tossing and turning, in the same bedroom where my teenage posters had hung on the wall, with my baby fussing next to me in his travel cot.

  By the morning, I’d spent hours torturing myself about whether I should phone him and take it all back. The reason I didn’t wasn’t because I was stubborn.

  I just instinctively knew I had to stay strong. He’d slept with someone else, for God’s sake. If there was any crawling back to be done, it had to be his.

  I was in for a long wait.

  Adam did not turn up at my doorstep with flowers or an engagement ring or make a grand gesture that said: I’m going to be the man you and William need. Who’ll love you both through thick and thin. And yes, I had sex with Georgina and missed the birth of our son. But I’m going to change.

  He didn’t say anything even close to it.

  Instead, he slipped away quietly, leaving me helpless in his absence.

  We did meet up once after the breakup—to see if we could “make a go of it.” But I sat across from him weeping, while Adam numbly went through the motions. The gulf between us couldn’t have been more obvious. I might’ve been the one who pushed, but he’d been edging towards the door, and he wasn’t going to beg to come back now. In the absence of any begging, I stuck to my guns.

  “After everything that’s happened, how we can live with each other?” I said. I genuinely wanted him to give me a convincing answer, but he was silent. “If we can even hope to do the right thing by William, I think this is the only way, don’t you?”

  The words were coming out of my mouth like I was writing a script from a soap opera. I remember holding out my hand, offering it to him to shake and wishing he’d push it aside, sweep me into his arms and say, No, I’m not going to let this happen, because you’re the love of my life.

  Instead, he leaned in, gave me a brief kiss on the cheek, then turned and walked away.

  I was consumed with regret in the following months. But as the years passed, I came to realize that I’d done the right thing. What I did was harder but braver. It ended our relationship, before our son knew any different. Before he had to go through the heartbreak of seeing his parents failing to make things work every day.

  Adam and Georgina, meanwhile, got together officially less than a month after we’d split up.

  He briefly moved in with her in London, and it was there that he got news that his mum’s brother—Uncle Frank—had died of liver failure. He left his entire estate to Adam, and although this amounted to a modest three-bedroom house and a pension, it was enough for Adam to start thinking about making his dreams to live and work abroad a reality. He quickly started to plan to move to France, and while I don’t know the details of why he split with Georgina, she was never part of that future.

  I can’t recall how often Adam saw William in the first year of his life before he went to France, because of the whirlwind of delight and despair I was going through. But I do remember feeling a bewilderment and fury that he clearly didn’t see William as I saw him: our angel, the best thing in the world, ever.

  It was soon after I recognized this that something snapped in me, and a defiance started building: if Adam wanted to stay out of the picture and leave bringing up William all to me, I was happy to oblige.

  Chapter 41

  The day after my trip to Pujols with Charlie, Adam turns up at the cottage.

  “I believe your date went well?” He has an odd look on his face, and I can’t work out if he’s interested, amused or simply reluctant to miss the opportunity to wind me up. I try to look unfazed.

  “It was nice. Yes. Thank you,” I say, giving the air of someone who went for afternoon tea with the Countess of Grantham rather than a boozy lunch that resulted in a smooch in the front seat of a Range Rover.

  He stares at me. “Good. I’m glad.”

  An unwelcome sensation starts to prickle under my skin; not disloyalty exactly—that would be ridiculous—but a whisper of something approaching it. Even if it hadn’t been ten years since we split up, I’d feel like slapping myself on both cheeks, reminding myself of exactly what he did to me and that it’s not long since I walked in on him and his girlfriend when she was in a state of semi-undress.

  “What is it?” I ask, to fill the silence.

  His lips twitch as if he’s trying to disguise a smile. “Nothing. Talking about first dates just reminded me of . . . the Pear Tree.”

  The name of that pub makes a rush of memories fill my head, of a time at the very beginning of our relationship.

  It was a balmy July night, and we whiled away an afternoon and most of the evening in an Edinburgh beer garden, under a canopy of gold light that warmed our shoulders.

  We sat side by side on a bench, so close that our thighs brushed each time we moved. I watched the tilt of his head as he spoke and felt a dizzying warmth when he laughed.

  I learned a lot about him that day: where he’d traveled, his passion for reading. I built up a picture of a man who was nice to bar staff, a generous tipper despite having little money himself. A man who went out of his way to befriend the guide dog whose owner sat at the next table and who didn’t make a fuss when someone splashed their drink on his jeans.

  Despite wrestling with anxiety in the run-up to the date, I don’t recall a single gap in conversation. Talking to him felt oddly easy and natural. As the blanket of darkness fell upon us, I felt his hand reach out for mine. Then I looked up and felt myself drowning in those eyes, certain in the knowledge that I was losing myself completely to him.

  “That was a good first date,” I agree in the most perfunctory fashion I can manage.

  He smiles briefly. Then our son appears at the door and begins a monologue about how William the Conqueror’s stomach exploded at his own funeral.

  * * *

  —

  Over the next few days, everything my mum ever wanted to occur between Adam and William starts to happen. They can’t stay away from each other. I keep looking for an ulterior motive, a logical reason why Adam—who’s been at best ambivalent about his responsibilities and at worst an absent father—can’t seem to get enough of his son.

  I realize that, technically, this is good. Not least because being able to report it back to Mum will give her a much-needed boost. But I keep wondering what the catch is. Can Adam really have finally fallen in love with William, just like that? Is he genuinely only now noticing that, although we screwed everything up between us, we still managed to make this gorgeous human being?

  My only option is to stifle any cynicism and see what happens. Besides, I can’t deny there’s entertainment value in listening to conversations between the two of them. William trails round after Adam, offering to help with jobs—pretending he’d recognize one end of a screwdriver from the other—while giving his father long lectures about everything from a crocodile’s inability to move its tongue and the fact that the ancient Romans vomited during dinner so they could make room for dessert. To Adam’s credit, he just about manages not to fall into a coma.

  I even heard him saying to Simone the other day: “Wait till William tells you about Horrible Histories,” before she was treated to a lesson about Egyptian mummification.

  On Tuesday morning, William joins Adam on a series of
errands in Bergerac, while Natasha spends the morning playing golf with Joshua; apparently, if it’s good enough for Catherine Zeta Jones, she’s prepared to give it a go. I had to stop myself from asking if she’d prefer to be playing golf with Ben, because I don’t think she’d want to admit the answer to that. And there’s no question that she’s right about one thing—if she is looking to settle down, or at least have a more meaningful relationship, it’s unlikely to happen with a twentysomething recently out of university. As gorgeous as Ben might be.

  I think about wandering over to Becky’s cottage but first pluck up the courage to knock on Charlie’s door. Only, by the time I’ve made the decision to do it, his car has gone and nobody is answering the door. Realizing we’re out of bread, I drive to the nearest village, Pravillac, where there’s a small but well-stocked shop.

  The door is open, and the second I step over the threshold, the air is filled with the sweet, hot scent of freshly baked croissants and floury baguettes. I pick one up, along with a newspaper from home, before finding myself in the wine aisle.

  “Bit early for that, isn’t it?”

  Seb’s tired but handsome eyes are smiling down at me, his blond hair ruffled, as if he’s just rolled out of bed—which, given the time the kids wake up, I seriously doubt is the case. I spot Rufus behind him, browsing eagerly through the sweets.

  “When you’re on holiday, it never feels too early. I was only window-shopping though. I promise.”

  “I believe you,” he laughs. “I think you’ve got a long way to go before you end up like poor old Richard Potter.”

  It takes me a moment to recall that he’s talking about a friend of his and Adam’s from university. “What happened to Richard Potter?”

  “Didn’t you hear? He and Nicky split up about two months ago.”