look like they’re telling the truth. I could believe him if I could just allow myself to.
‘Why don’t you leave that?’ he says, his fingers trailing lightly down my back. ‘Come upstairs.’
‘I’ll come up when I’ve finished,’ I say, pulling away from him.
‘Okay, but don’t make me wait too long,’ he says, nuzzling my neck with feather-light kisses that threaten to make my knees buckle.
I could go up. I want to go up, but I’m afraid of making a fool of myself. If I give in, then I’m saying that I believe what he’s telling me. And what if I’m wrong? Will he wallow in his ingenuity? Lose respect for his wife? Laugh about it with his mistress? The incessant rattling in my brain grows louder and I pour myself another glass of wine in a bid to quieten it down.
My laptop is open on the dining room table and I wake up the screen with a swipe of my finger. Pixels of colour instantly burst into life as a photo of us all at Disneyland two years ago comes to the fore. From the outside, we look happy, like a normal family, enjoying everything that life has to offer. But if you look really closely and give it more than a cursory glance, you can see a pain in mine and Sophia’s eyes. It’s as though there’s a glaze; a transparent barrier that holds the world back at arm’s length. Too fearful of letting anything get too close, knowing that it can be snatched away the moment you let your guard down.
Against my better judgement, I open up Facebook and start trawling through the exaggerated lives of my ‘suggested friends’. Gina Fellowes, a friend of a friend I once knew, is currently at Manchester airport and looking forward to a ‘sick, no-holds barred’ hen weekend in Ibiza. Michelle Truman, the wife of my second cousin’s son, is ‘feeling blessed’ at her best friend’s granddaughter’s christening. I already feel worse than I did a few minutes ago.
I become fascinated by the power of algorithms as name after loosely connected name is offered up as a potential ‘friend’. I vaguely remember Jack Stokes from my first job in London and Lindsay Brindley as one of the mothers from Sophia’s Year One class. The tenuous connections make me feel uneasy, as if someone is trawling through my head, ravaging the cobwebbed corners that store information that is no longer needed. When I see the face I want to see, more than anyone else in the world, I almost gloss over it as being too familiar to concern myself with. But as I continue to scroll down, the image starts burning itself into my brain.
Tom Evans, my Tom, is on Facebook.
I race back up the screen, not knowing whether I want to be seeing things or not. In my haste I miss him and force myself to slow down as I go through the images again.
My heart feels as if it’s stopped when I see his face peering out at me; like a hand is in my chest and squeezing the life out of it. His eyes bore into mine, from the same photo that Sophia keeps in a frame on her bedside. My fingers trace the outline of his lips, and if I try really hard I can almost feel them pulsing.
How have I not seen this before? Why hasn’t he been flagged up to me, his wife, as a contact? I didn’t even know he was on Facebook. Surely his account would have been closed down by now. I feel sick as I click on his photo, frightened to see the friends he made and the conversations he had before he died.
There’s a photo of him on his news feed, the last one I took, on the day he left for Switzerland. He’s wearing the navy shirt I bought him for his birthday. His eyes, so much like Sophia’s, glisten in anticipation of his trip, excited for what lay ahead.
I look around the dining table, to the chair he had been sitting in the morning he went. He and Sophia had been side by side, smiling at me as I came down from the shower with a towel still wrapped around my head.
‘What are you two up to?’ I’d asked, their faces full of mischief.
Sophia giggled. ‘Can I show her, Daddy? Can I show her?’
‘Show me what?’ I’d said suspiciously.
‘You’re so rubbish at keeping secrets, Sophia,’ he laughed, nudging her with