well,” I said. “Or rather, we only got on well because I did whatever he wanted. I wasn’t happy at home.” I hesitated before going on. Some people just don’t get it and I had a horrible feeling Sarah was going to be one of them. “Tom’s hard to live with. He’s controlling. Possessive. I’ve wanted to leave for a long time.”
Sarah seemed confused. “That’s not how he came across when I met him.”
“No, he could put on a great mask.”
“Yeah, they’re never the same in company as they are when you’re on your own with them. But are you sure it wasn’t just because you were in love with Harry and you were comparing them?”
I shook my head. “I almost left a couple of years ago, before I even started working with Harry. I’d just about had enough. And then my mum fell over and broke her arm, so that took me out of the house some, and things were a bit easier. But then a couple of Christmases ago it was awful.”
“What happened?”
“Just an argument,” I said. It had been more than that, though. You know when someone says something and it cuts you to the quick? I was naked at the time and Tom was clothed, which made me feel so much more vulnerable. It wasn’t something I was going to talk to Sarah about.
She reached out and touched my wrist. “Don’t you wear your Fitbit now?”
We both looked down at my wrist. I was wearing a bangle instead; it felt too odd to have nothing there.
“I’ve never seen you without it,” she said. “Where is it?”
“I gave it back to him. He . . .” I knew she wouldn’t understand me, but I’d had enough gin to keep going. “He tracked me all the time.”
“What, where you were?”
“No, it didn’t do that, thank God. He tracked my footsteps.”
She frowned. “What?”
“He would check it, see how many steps I’d taken.”
“Oh, Adam does that,” she said. “We both wear one at the weekend and he’s always checking his against mine. When we went to New York in the summer I did twice as many steps as he did, even though we were together all the time.” She laughed. “That’s the advantage of being so much shorter than him. He never got over it. Said it was much easier for me to do ten thousand steps.”
I knew this story. She’d told me about it ten times. “It isn’t like that, though. He’s always trying to catch me out. Let’s say I go to the shops one Saturday. I walk there, buy the newspaper, walk back again. Then the next Saturday I’ll do it again and he’ll check the steps against the first trip. And then he’ll cause a fight, saying I didn’t go to the shop I said I’d gone to. And one day I didn’t wear it to work. He was convinced I hadn’t gone to work at all. He kept a check of everything I did, Sarah. Every step I took. I couldn’t bear it.”
I didn’t tell her about the times I’d try to fool him. I always parked in different spots in the office car park, to confuse him. He seemed to think I should be doing roughly the same steps each day. I could tell he was comforted if the figures matched his expectations. A few weeks ago I gave the Fitbit to Harry, who put it in his pocket when he was going to a meeting in Manchester; he knew he’d walk for a couple of miles. He told me he’d gone up and down the stairs several times instead of using the lift, just so that the figures would be skewed. That was after I’d told him about it, of course. When I knew I was leaving. He’d been horrified and wanted me to throw it away, but by then I just wanted to hand it back to Tom when I left. He’d know what I meant.
“Honestly,” said Sarah, “you’re reading too much into that. He’s just trying to keep you healthy. Anything else he’s supposed to have done?”