for an MBA. We’d based the date we’d leave home on her departure date as neither of us wanted to work with her once she knew Harry was leaving her sister for me.
I bumped into her by the lifts as I was about to head off home.
“Sorry I’m so late to see Harry,” she’d said. “I’ve been rushing around all day. I need to hand over all my work. Is he in his office?”
“He’s still in a meeting with Rick Brown. He shouldn’t be long.”
I felt so awkward as I took her to my office and made her some coffee. She told me about her new course and her hopes for job opportunities afterward, and I felt like the worst kind of woman, chatting to her when her brother-in-law was planning to leave her sister to be with me.
“You go off, Ruby,” she said after a few minutes. “Sorry to have kept you.” She took her coffee into Harry’s office. “I’ll wait here for him.” She pulled her phone out of her bag and I could see that I was dismissed. “I’ve got some calls to make before I go.”
* * *
? ? ?
I stayed in the hotel room all day, calling for room service, waiting for Harry to show up. I was still expecting him to come flying through the door, apologizing like crazy, kissing me and hugging me and wanting reassurance that I hadn’t changed my mind. The room was reasonably big, but I felt confined. I hated sitting still all the time and found myself pacing, walking around the two armchairs and coffee table, around the desk and leather chair, just walking and walking around the room, counting each step I took to try to stop myself obsessing about where on earth he was.
Social media was not my friend that day. I stared obsessively at his photo on Facebook. It was one from a couple of years ago, before I’d known him. He was on holiday, sitting at a bar in Jamaica, drinking a cold beer. He was smiling and raising a glass in celebration; I’d always hated that photo, because I’d known he was smiling at Emma. Just as a stopped clock is right twice a day, a marriage is never completely unhappy. There will be days—or moments, even—when everything’s fine and you remember why you’re with that person. That photo seemed to have caught one of those moments in their marriage.
He and I had never been friends on Facebook. I rarely used it; it just seemed to magnify the faults in my life.
“Emma uses my phone sometimes,” he said when I asked him about it. “I don’t want to have to worry about whether she’s going to see messages we’ve sent each other. It’s not fair to her. And I don’t want to see what you’re up to with your husband. I don’t want to see photos of you both and see what a great time you’re having.”
I didn’t know exactly which recent photos of us would show that, but I knew what he meant. “What about Twitter?”
“I hardly use it unless it’s for work. I don’t use social media that much, really. Emma does, much more than I do. She loves Instagram.”
I wished he hadn’t told me that. As soon as he went into a meeting I turned my screen so that Sarah couldn’t see it and signed up to Instagram, using an alias. There was Emma, with gleaming blond hair and a huge smile. Her eyes were blue, her skin tanned, and she looked so confident, so feisty, that immediately I knew why Harry was with her. I felt sick with jealousy. I closed the screen and carried on with my work, but all I could think about was the way she looked at the camera straight on, her chin tilted upward, her gaze direct. She wasn’t someone I wanted to get on the wrong side of.
I hadn’t looked at Instagram since. I hadn’t wanted to think about Emma, to see what I was up against. But that day, on my own at the hotel, I went through every single post she’d made on there. I looked at the photos she’d taken, the comments she made, the people she followed. I