shot through me. “Or so I thought. It turned out he wasn’t special at all.”
Oliver sat back, staring at me. “You were seeing someone else?”
I shrugged. “Nothing came of it.”
I wasn’t going to tell him about my affair with Harry. That was private, something I held to myself even now, when I was in bed in the dark. No matter what had happened between Harry and me, nobody could take that time away from me. And I knew that wherever Harry was, whatever he was up to now, it would be the same for him.
CHAPTER 21
Ruby
On Monday morning I got up early and drove to Sarah’s house to put my letter to Harry through her door before she left for work.
She lived on a quiet street a couple of miles from my flat. As I approached her house I could see it was in darkness with the curtains drawn, and, like her neighbors, it seemed that she and her family were still sleeping. As quietly as I could I pushed the envelope through her letterbox and slid away in the early-morning mist back to my car.
I started to drive toward my flat, but when I turned on the radio and heard the six o’clock news bulletin, I thought of Harry and what he’d said to me one day.
“I wake every morning just before the alarm at six thirty,” he’d said. “Isn’t it odd how that happens? Every single day I wonder what’s woken me. And I lie there and my mind seems to scan through everything that might have happened. Was it my phone? Someone at the door? A car engine starting? And then, always, within a second or two, my alarm will go off. And that happens no matter what time it’s set for.”
“Is it an alarm clock?” I’d asked. “Does it make a slight sound, just before it rings?”
“No, it’s my phone. Hold on, though, let’s check.”
And he set his alarm for a minute’s time and we sat in silence, the two of us, leaning forward to listen, to check whether we could hear something, a sign that the alarm was going to go off. And then when it did, with a blast of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” I shrieked and jumped.
That evening I’d set my own alarm for the same time the next morning and I’d woken a few seconds beforehand, just as he did, and lay there in the soft darkness of my bed, with Tom lying beside me, still in a deep sleep. I thought of Harry in his own bed, lying next to Emma. I wondered whether they were lying close together, whether his arm had snaked around her waist in the night, or her legs were entangled with his. I turned to look at Tom, at his dark wavy hair, tousled on the pillow. He was lying as far from me as he could, and I’d been clinging to the edge of our bed in my sleep.
I’d felt a familiar stab of jealousy, deep inside, and wished I wasn’t here in this bed with Tom. I wished I was anywhere else. I’d known Harry for only a few weeks at that point and already I longed to go in to work. On Saturdays and Sundays I found the time dragged, and when Tom suggested a long weekend away, I turned it down. I didn’t want to be alone with him. I needed the distractions of everyday life to cope with living with the wrong man.
* * *
? ? ?
Now it was as though I was operating on automatic pilot as I drove down Sarah’s street and took a left turn, knowing that this would eventually take me to Harry’s house. I was last here the day after he was meant to leave home, when I still thought he’d come to me.
I sat in my car a few doors down from his house, on the other side of the street. The curtains were closed and the house was dark. His car was parked at the front, next to Emma’s red Mini, and I knew he was home, back from his holiday from real life.
And then dead-on six thirty, just as he’d told me,