“Hi,” I said when he came into the house. And it was so odd. He smiled at me but he looked different, somehow. His smile was just too polite and he didn’t quite meet my eyes. Now, we’ve been together through thick and thin, but he’s never done that before. Immediately I was on high alert.
He dumped his bag down on the hall table. “Hi.”
“Did you remember we’re going out with Annie and Patrick tonight?”
“Yeah, sorry I’m late.”
Still odd. Still no eye contact. My skin started to prickle. I went up to him and kissed him on his cheek. He stood still to let me, not responding with a return kiss. With a jolt I remembered his crush on Ruby and realized that that fear had never really gone away. I quickly glanced at his face for signs of lipstick, took an inward breath to detect a hint of perfume. There was nothing; this did confuse me, I admit. I have a pretty good scent both for perfume and for danger—or I thought I had—and I could have sworn there’d be something there. But no, all I could smell were the traces of his cologne from that morning, and his shirt was still crisp and uncreased.
He pulled away from me. “I’d better get a shower.”
I followed him upstairs, telling him about my day and noting he wasn’t saying much about his own. I knew he had something on his mind. Something that I wouldn’t want to hear.
He waited until he was in the shower before he told me.
“Oh, by the way,” he said.
I steeled myself. Something was coming. Whenever someone tells you something you really don’t want to hear, they do it with their face covered, either in the shower, while taking off a sweater, or in the pitch-dark of a bedroom. It’s Psychology 101, isn’t it?
So, he said, “By the way, you know that trip to Paris?”
“No.” I knew perfectly well which one he meant. It was the following weekend. He’d put it on the kitchen calendar. Now I wondered whether this would be our own personal Armageddon. I felt my body, taut and wired, and didn’t know whether I wanted to run away or to fight. “Which trip is that?”
“It’s in a few days’ time.” From the careful way he spoke, I realized he knew exactly how many days it was. He probably had a little calendar he ticked off every day, like a child’s Advent calendar, though with a bigger incentive than a sliver of chocolate. “A week from today, I think. There’s a conference and I’m going to see about getting some French suppliers on board. We’re giving a presentation, too. Remember?”
My throat was dry but I forced myself to act normally. “Oh, I remember now,” I said. “That sounds interesting. Paris should be fun, too. Will you meet Ben there?” Ben was a friend of ours from university; he’d been living in Paris since we all left Manchester almost twenty years ago. “It would be good for you to meet up.”
The pause was three seconds; I counted.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “There’ll be a few of us going so I probably won’t have time.”
If I could have pointed a torch beam in his eyes to get the truth out of him just then, I would have. “Oh? Who’s going?”
“Nobody interesting.” He reeled off the names of a few of the younger guys who I knew would be off looking for a bar as soon as they landed. I waited. Here it came. “And Ruby’s coming. We need someone to help with the presentation.” Another pause. “We won’t see much of her, though. She’ll be off sightseeing as soon as she gets the chance.”
“That sounds like fun!” I said, in dutiful-wife mode. “You’ll have a great time.”
He switched off the shower and grabbed a towel. When he spoke, his voice was light with relief. “Oh, it won’t be fun,” he said. “You know that sort of thing; it can get boring at times. I’ll book into a hotel with a gym, I think. It’ll give me something to do in the evenings.”