Cory came and stood beside me. ‘She wanted to tell you, but she wasn’t sure any of you would ever need to know.’
‘Why now, Cory? When I can’t ask her anything? Why did she even tell you? And why did you tell us? What did you hope to gain?’
He stepped back. ‘Gain? I didn’t hope to gain anything. Do you think I wanted to do this? Christ, Jo. I know you don’t think much of my morals, but I’ve always tried to be a good friend. To all of you.’ He ran his fingers through his hair. ‘I knew you were angling for Victor to go and live in Australia with Ginny’s brother. In the letter, Ginny made me promise not to tell you unless it was absolutely necessary.’
The clues had been sitting there all these years – Ginny resolutely refusing to discuss Victor’s father. Her subdued reaction when she’d discovered that I was going out with Patrick. Victor’s blue eyes. My disappointment that she hadn’t been more effusive when we’d announced our engagement. Her laughter, uncharacteristically unkind, when Patrick had got in a tangle with Phoebe’s baby sling. An odd little moment when she’d shown no interest in the results of a family photo shoot I’d had done for my fortieth birthday.
It was as though, after many years, I’d finally knocked the winning ten pence off the shelf in the amusement arcade, nudging all the others to come cascading down. My mind wheeled back to the last days before she died, when the only time she rallied was to say, ‘Victor belongs with you.’ Even if the idea had terrified me, I’d been stupid enough to be flattered that she trusted me with her precious son. But now, I understood. It wasn’t me. Nothing to do with me. She was sending him to be safe with his dad. The pain of her betrayal was physical, a sensation that made me dizzy and nauseous.
Cory pressed his palm against the window, leaving a greasy print. ‘I wouldn’t have even agreed to keep the letter if I’d known. I thought it was the details of Victor’s Canadian dad. I was thinking, well, I’m not sure what I was thinking. I was hoping that we could involve him somehow. Take the pressure off you two.’
‘Ginny was betting on what would happen if we learnt the truth, wasn’t she?’
Cory nodded. ‘I suppose so. I assume she thought it would mean that Patrick would never ask Victor to leave. And I guess she hoped you’d be big enough to accept it.’
I swung round to face Patrick. ‘You knew. You must have known.’
He was pale with shock.
‘I didn’t, I promise. I’d asked her, before, ages ago, if the baby could be mine. She was adamant he wasn’t.’
‘Tell me when. How did you come to sleep with my best friend?’
Patrick looked to Cory for support. ‘New Year’s Eve. Remember Ginny’s joke? That if she hadn’t got married by thirty, she’d marry one of us? Cory had gone off with one of Ginny’s publishing friends. And it was just us. We were drunk. We stayed up too late. She reminded me of the joke and we sort of dared each other. We were both single. We felt life was passing us by and I suppose we were just seeing if there was anything there. It was one of those things. We knew straight away it didn’t mean anything. We just, you know…’ Patrick shrugged.
‘No. No. I don’t know. I know that you slept with my best friend and never felt the need to tell me. I know my best friend slept with my husband and thought she’d send their son to live with us. I know that I feel like a total and utter fool.’ I turned to Cory. ‘I suppose you were privy to all this? Were you aware that my husband had had sex with Ginny? Was I the only one of the happy little band of four who was blundering along in blissful ignorance?’
I’d never really considered sympathy or pity as one of Cory’s standout attributes. He was much more of the ‘What’s done is done, so get on with it’ school of thought, but in that moment, he looked genuinely sad and sorry. ‘Jo, Patrick wasn’t your husband at the time, you weren’t even going out with each other. Don’t you remember what it was like back then? We were all a bit confused, trying to work out who we were and the