The Fallout (2 page)

Josh's anger was mounting and Dan put up both his hands in mock surrender.

“Look, Josh, I get why you're upset. I'd feel the same if our positions were reversed. And I love you for being so protective of Sash. But the fact is, I
am
leaving her. I've made up my mind.” Dan said this as though making up his mind about something was all it took. As if he had only to formulate the intent for the deed to be done. His self-assuredness stoked Josh's fury. “And what I really need is for you to help make it as painless as possible—for Sasha's sake and September's. Not for mine. This thing with Sienna is still very new. It might come to absolutely nothing. It'd be stupid to throw that into the mix now when we all need things to be as clean and simple as possible. I don't want to hurt Sash any more than necessary.”

“You're all heart.”

* * *

“What?”

“I'm not supposed to tell you. I was sworn to secrecy. But seeing as he's probably telling her as we speak, and there's a good chance she'll turn up on the doorstep at any moment in the throes of a nervous breakdown, I thought it was only fair to warn you.”

Hannah had her hand clapped over her mouth, above which her pale blue eyes appeared almost completely circular. “You've got to be kidding me. Oh my
God
. Poor Sash. What a bastard. What a complete and utter bastard.”

“To be fair, he seemed pretty cut up about it.”

Josh couldn't understand why he was defending Dan. It wasn't as if he had the slightest bit of sympathy for what he was doing. Still, some intrinsic friend-protection instinct was kicking in and he found himself trying to justify what Dan was doing.

“You know Sasha isn't the easiest person.”

“And that makes it okay, does it, to cheat on her with a twenty-four-year-old and break a little girl's heart?”

“Twenty-four isn't exactly a little girl...”

“Don't even joke about it, Josh. You know exactly what I mean. These are our friends, remember? How many Saturday nights have we spent with them? How many trips have we taken together? He can't break it off over some stupid affair. He just can't.”

Josh had the oddest idea that Hannah was talking about Dan splitting up with
them
rather than Sasha. He remembered Dan's face when he'd talked about Sienna, but this clearly wasn't the time to suggest to Hannah that this might be more than a “stupid affair.”

“I can't believe it. I really can't.”

Josh shifted along the battered wine-colored velvet sofa Hannah had fallen so in love with on eBay, she'd had the door frame dismantled to get it into the house. He put a tentative arm around her, half expecting her to wriggle away, as she sometimes did these days. Hannah was always so tired lately, and now that their sex life had dwindled to almost nothing, all physical contact between them seemed to carry extra weight, with the result that they didn't touch each other nearly as much—or as naturally—as they used to. He felt her shoulders trembling under his hands.

“Hey.” He tilted her face up toward him so he could see her properly, taking in the freckles he adored (and she claimed to despise) and the mouth with its mismatched lips—the top one thin and well-defined and the bottom almost indecently plump. “Don't get so upset. Of course it's horrible, but we're still okay.”

Hannah's eyes, canopied by slender but surprisingly dark eyebrows, peered up at him through a glaze of tears.

“But they're our best friends. I thought they were so happy together. Was that all a show? And if it can happen to them, what's to stop it happening to us?”

Josh pulled her closer, savoring the nearness, and planted a kiss on the top of her head. Despite everything, he allowed himself a little smile. Trust Hannah to jump straight to the worst-case scenario. What was it that bereavement therapist had called her? A catastrophist, that was it. As if you could catch divorce from other people, like the flu.

“Never,” he whispered into her hair.

After a moment, Hannah pulled away, looking utterly wretched.

“Oh, but when I think about little September, growing up without her father...”

“Not according to Dan. He thinks it will be the most amicable split in the world. He's got it all worked out. He and Sasha will sell the house and buy two flats within walking distance of each other. September will be able to see both of them whenever she wants to. She won't even notice they're not together.”

“What alien planet does he get this stuff from? He really thinks he's going to move in down the road with some bloody schoolgirl bimbo and everything's going to go on just as before?”

Hannah got to her feet and started angrily clearing up the remains of the Indian takeout, which were spread across the coffee table in front of them in a selection of containers, all smeared with orange or ochre-colored sauce. A telltale pink flush was sweeping across her normally pale cheeks, and Josh felt a twinge of alarm, remembering how he'd promised not to say anything to her.

“You're not going to call Sasha, are you? Dan made me promise I wouldn't tell you about any of it, but especially not about her. About Sienna.”

He was nervous now, conscious suddenly of going back on a promise, of having been compromised.

Hannah made a snorting noise at the name.

“No, really,” Josh went on. “He doesn't want it to get out about him seeing someone else. He says it will make things nastier than they need to be.”

“He should have thought about that before he got his dick out then, shouldn't he?”

Hannah stalked out of the living room, hands full of dirty plates and foil cartons. Josh heard her clattering around in the tiny kitchen, and he tried to still the involuntary leap his thoughts had taken hearing Hannah say the word
dick
.

“Please, Hannah. Don't say anything. I should never have told you.”

She reappeared in the doorway and flung herself back onto the sofa, curling her long legs in their black leggings up underneath her.

“Okay,” she said. “But I just want you to know I hate lying to Sasha. It isn't right for him to ask you to do this. She deserves to know the truth.”

“Yes, but not from us. It's not our place. We have to stay neutral.”

“But how am I supposed to look her in the eye? Don't forget they're coming for lunch tomorrow.”

Josh slung his arm around her once more, emboldened by his previous success, and she snuggled back against him.

“I wouldn't bank on it. Dan says he's telling her tonight. I can't imagine they'll be here playing happy families tomorrow.”

Chapter 2

“My head feels like there's a marching band inside it, clashing cymbals and playing those big curly brass thingies and jumping up and down.”

“Why would a marching band jump up and down?”

“Don't bother trying to provoke me, Dan, I'm too ill to rise to it.”

Sasha was draped across the same sofa where Josh and Hannah had sat up far too late the previous night debating Dan's shock announcement. Her glossy black hair was fanned out across a worn brown faux fur cushion and one of her hands was flung across her eyes, all but obscuring her small, neat features. Her legs in their skinny jeans were stretched out and she'd kicked off her sneakers so that she could rest her bare, brown, child-sized feet on Dan's jean-clad thigh. She looked a lot like someone with a hangover. She did not look like someone whose husband had just announced he was going to leave her.

“He couldn't tell her,” Josh whispered to Hannah as they squeezed together into the kitchen to prepare lunch. His cheeks, always rosy, were flushed pink by the heat emanating from the oven into the confined space, and he kept pushing the thick hair—which she liked to point out was the exact color and texture of a doormat—back from his overheated face. When he glanced at her, his expressive brown eyes were smudged with worry. “He was going to but then their neighbors turned up unexpectedly.”

“Brilliant. So now we've got to sit across the table from each other pretending everything's hunky-dory, when all the while there's this...
time bomb
waiting to go off.”

“What else can we do?”

“I can't believe he's just sitting there, behaving as if nothing was wrong. Did you see that he was stroking her feet? It's so cruel.”

“Why are you whispering in there? Do you hate us? Do you wish we would leave?”

At the sound of Sasha's voice, Hannah glared at Josh. Upstairs she could hear September and Lily playing together, September's voice loud and clear over Lily's gentle murmur. How many lazy weekends had they passed in this way, the six of them? The realization that this might be the last was so savagely painful that Hannah, her hand frozen in the act of chopping up some fresh basil, felt she literally couldn't breathe.

“Yes. Go away and take your disgusting, unsavory hangovers with you,” called Josh, making a “pull yourself together” face at Hannah.

Lunch was, as always, a long, drawn-out affair spent around the heavy pine dining table, which was squashed into the area behind the sofa in the living room. The two little girls joined them for the start of the meal, kneeling on cushions that they placed over the seats of the wooden chairs and chattering to each other as they tucked in to their mini portions of lasagna. September, six weeks older than Lily, led the conversation as usual, lurching from subject to subject seemingly without rhyme or reason. Hannah's heart pinched a little when she saw how her daughter's face scrunched up in concentration as she struggled to follow her friend, while at the same time furtively digging out suspicious-looking vegetable matter from her dish and laying it to one side.

“Is it me or is everyone really flat today?” Sasha was seated at the head of the table, close to the French doors that led onto the communal garden, where the late-blooming flowers looked out of place in the grey, early September chill. Her eyes flickered from face to face, expecting a response. Hannah looked away.

“We're not being very good company today, are we? We're just a bit tired, that's all.”

She gestured briefly toward Lily with her hand, as if blaming her for them being below par, and then immediately felt guilty. Poor Lily, she was so good. She didn't deserve to be made a scapegoat.

“Can we get down now?”

September had finished her lunch and was rocking on her chair, her chocolate-brown curls quivering as she moved.

“I don't think Lily's quite finished yet. Maybe you could just wait a few...”

The rest of Hannah's gentle entreaty was drowned out by Sasha interrupting, “Sure, poppet, you get down.”

Sasha turned to Hannah.

“Sorry, Hannah. I just didn't want Temmy to get fidgety. You know how touchy she can be.”

Hannah smiled and hoped her irritation didn't show.

“Can I go, too, Mummy? Please?”

Lily still had food on her plate, but she was already gazing off after September, her lasagna forgotten, her blue eyes full of longing.

“No, Lily. You need to finish. Just that little bit on your plate.”

“But September didn't.”

“No, but September is a guest. Tell you what—if you eat four more forkfuls, you can be finished.”

Hannah sighed inwardly as Lily loaded her fork with the minimum amount of food possible and brought it into her mouth four times, counting in whispers under her breath before throwing down the utensil triumphantly and scooting off to find her friend.

“Thank you for the lovely food,” she called over her shoulder in a singsong voice.

Hannah got up and started clearing away the plates. The little incident with September had done nothing to improve her mood. It wasn't the first time Sasha had talked over her. Sometimes she felt as if nothing she said actually mattered.
Am I here?
she wanted to say.
Can you even see me?
She kept forgetting about what Josh had told her about Dan, and then suddenly it would come back to her. In the kitchen, she angrily scraped food off the plates into the plastic container they used for collecting compost, perversely enjoying the harsh, grating noise of metal on china.

“You okay there?”

Dan had appeared in the doorway with the big white earthenware dish that had held the lasagna, and the salad bowl, still half-full.

Hannah said she was fine.

She couldn't look at him, focusing instead on the chrome bin that took up half the floor space. Josh had told her it was too big, but she'd insisted on getting it after seeing the same one in Sasha's old kitchen.

“You just seem a bit on edge, that's all.”

“I've got a lot on my mind.”

“Like?”

“Like what do you think, Dan?”

She looked at him then. A look that saw him react first with surprise and then, after a second's delay, anger.

“He told you. The fucker told you.”

Dan was whispering, but his voice still hissed loudly around the compact room.

“Of course he told me. We're married. We don't have secrets from each other.”

“He shouldn't have. He promised.”

Dan's face, normally so open and placid, was dark with rage, but Hannah pretended not to notice.

“Look, Dan. I want to ask you, beg you, to think again. Look at everything you have to lose. Sasha, September. You'll break their hearts. And for what? For a fling.”

“It's not a fling.”

Hannah had never heard Dan's voice sound so hard, even allowing for the whispering. He was always so charming, so ready to see everyone else's point of view.

“Listen, I know how you feel, but you don't know how things are at home between me and Sash. And now I've met someone who makes me feel good about myself for the first time in years. And I'd be grateful if you and Josh would just butt out.”

“Dan...” Sasha's voice came wafting from the next room. “Bring in another bottle of red, would you?”

Dan glared at Hannah before snatching up the bottle they'd brought, still wrapped in its tissue paper, and stalking out.

“Coming, my little lush!”

Alone in the kitchen, Hannah leaned back against the stove and put her head in her hands. She and Sasha had had their moments over the four and a half years they'd been friends. She could remember a handful of times when they'd snapped at each other over one thing or another (although, if she remembered rightly, she was pretty sure most of the snapping had come from Sasha) but she'd never once had a cross word with Dan. He was always the laid-back one. Always the one to smooth out tensions with a joke or a well-placed compliment.

For the first time, Hannah allowed herself to picture how life might be dividing their time between a separated Sasha and Dan.

It didn't bear thinking about.

* * *

“G'way!”

Hannah had been dreaming about
that night
again for the first time in ages. Battling into consciousness, heart racing, airway constricted with dread, her mind was still filled with images of Gemma's battered head and her mum's twisted, angry mouth. It took a moment for her to calm down enough to translate the indistinct noise Josh had made into proper words.

“Go away,” he said again, more distinctly this time.

Both of them raised themselves onto their elbows and listened as the doorbell of their ground-floor flat sounded a second time, setting off Toby barking.

Hannah staggered to her feet.

She had always been better at getting up than Josh. Even before her skills in that area were honed by months and years of night feedings, bad dreams and brutal dawn risings, she'd never struggled like him with that middle dimension between sleep and wakefulness. She liked to be up and getting on with things. Lying awake in the early morning was when you had time to think, and there were things that Hannah really didn't like to think about. Anyway, life was already so short, it seemed to her. Why wouldn't you make the most of what time you had?

Dragging on her old purple terrycloth robe and regretting, as she always did, that she hadn't got around to replacing it, she made her way into the hallway, giving Toby a reassuring pat as she passed so he would settle back down in his basket. At least living in such a compact space meant you were never very far from the front door.

“All right already,” she muttered as the bell rang a third time, a long desperate buzz.

“Mummy?” Lily's voice from her little bedroom across the hall was still soaked in sleep. With any luck she wouldn't properly wake up.

“It's all right, Lil. Go back to sleep.”

Up until this point, Hannah had been too focused on getting up and making sure Lily wasn't disturbed to think about what a visitor in the middle of the night might mean. But in the split second it took to press the buzzer on the intercom, she remembered what had happened the previous day.

“It's me. Sasha.” If Hannah hadn't already known whom to expect, she'd never have recognized the voice that crackled through the intercom, deep and croaky and full of lumps.

Hannah buzzed her in and by the time she'd slid open both bolts and unchained the door that led from their flat into the communal lobby, Sasha was already there. She fell into Hannah's arms, her wraithlike body shaking violently under her thin denim jacket.

“Oh, my God, Hannah,” she said in that same, choked un-Sasha voice.

Hannah held her friend tight.

“Come on, Sash,” she murmured, aware they were still standing in the open doorway, letting a cool breeze into the flat. “Let's go sit down.”

Sasha allowed herself to be led into the living room, where Hannah deposited her on the sofa.

“I'll make us some tea.”

If Sasha wondered why Hannah wasn't quizzing her about what had happened, she didn't say. Instead she merely nodded. Her normally elfin features had puffed up, so that her slanted hazel eyes, with their canopy of thick black lashes, were practically swollen shut.

Waiting for the kettle to boil, Hannah leaned her forehead against the cool fridge door, trying not to hear the gulping sobs coming from the next room. She felt guilty now for the times over the last few years that she'd wished Sasha ill. No, not ill, just for something in Sasha's picture-perfect world not to go to plan for once, just something to make her life slightly less shiny and more in line with Hannah's own.

She'd never had a friend like Sasha before. If their babies hadn't brought them together she probably still wouldn't have a friend like Sasha. The two women led such different lives they'd never normally have crossed paths, like a Venn diagram where the two circles bobbed about completely independently with no point of intersection. Unlike Hannah, Sasha hadn't gone to university. Instead, she'd had a series of glamorous temporary jobs in small boutique galleries and country house retreats in exotic locations. She always seemed to know someone who could fix her up with something, and if not, the trust set up by her wealthy father could usually be relied on to come to her aid. After she met Dan, she'd stopped working altogether, long before September came along, and—here was the thing—she never felt guilty about it. She spent her time on “projects” to do with the house (a simple bathroom refit could easily turn into a four-month full-time job involving mood boards and teams of designers and builders) or arranging holidays or, after September was born, taking the little girl to art and music classes, even tiny-tot Italian lessons. Hannah knew other women who didn't work, but none had that same sense of entitlement that Sasha did. “Just 'til the kids start school,” they'd say, these other apologetic mothers. “Child-care costs are so astronomical.” But Sasha would look at Hannah like a sleek Siamese cat and say “Why would I work if I don't have to?” And it would be Hannah who felt shortchanged, like there was something lacking.

Hannah, on the other hand, was all about the guilt. Sometimes she wondered if it would be such an integral part of her if it hadn't been for what happened as a teenager, but other times she felt guilt was woven into the thread of her DNA. She felt bad for the decisions she made, and for the ones she didn't, for all the people she imagined she'd let down. An ambitious girl from a largely unambitious background, she'd worked hard to get to university in London, switching from French to Journalism in her second year when her sister Gemma finally convinced her it was okay to do a subject she liked, rather than one she thought might be “useful,” and harder still to get a staff job on a magazine for teenagers. She'd always imagined she'd take the minimum maternity leave and be straight back to the nine-to-five (or in her case more like ten to eight), but when Lily came along, she realized how little suited babies were to being slotted in around work like so much superfluous padding. Reluctantly she'd resigned the staff job and gone freelance, and now spent her days wildly oscillating between feeling guilt-ridden at spending too little time with her child, and guilt-ridden at spending too little time on her badly paid freelance work. Even when she
was
with her daughter, she was feeling badly about how boring she often found the whole monotonous routine: feeding, washing, playing, filling the endless hours with repetitive games and storybooks you'd read so many times you thought you might explode at the sight of them. Nobody ever talked about the boredom—it was like if you admitted it, you were admitting you didn't love your child.