the pool, Tom reading under a tree – and thinking how different this holiday could have been. Your mum could have died. You’d still be here and she wouldn’t.
Not that he could tell her any of this. She was trying to get better: he couldn’t burden her.
‘Are you okay there?’ Johnny was looking at him with concern. ‘Come up the town. We’ll have a drink with Marcello. Man stuff! Well, we can pretend. Liam, are you on for it?’
‘No espresso,’ Johnny said to Marcello. ‘If we’re “talking about our feelings”, we need beer.’
‘Ah, stop,’ Ed said. ‘I can’t spill my guts to order.’ Besides, these men wouldn’t understand. He and Cara were different from Johnny and Jessie, from Liam and Nell, from any other couple.
Before he’d met Cara, all three of his long-term girlfriends had dumped him. He wasn’t serious enough – about life, about his career, about them … In the early days of a relationship, he’d be lauded for his easy-going attitude but eventually that would curdle into angry charges that he was ‘detached’ and ‘too independent’.
He’d always been okay in his own company, even as a kid. Growing up, he had idolized his older brother Johnny. But when he’d noticed how hard Johnny worked to make everyone love him, his hero-worship had mutated into something nearer to pity.
As an adult, he was comfortable going on solo holidays. He’d strike up conversations on trains, in bars – he’d talk to anyone and he was always okay. By the time he’d met Cara, he was thirty-two and had the reputation of a nice guy who was not to be taken seriously. All of that had changed when he climbed a ladder at a house party. That night, the higher he got, the more frightened he became. Then the woman at the foot of the ladder had called up to him, ‘I’ve got you. You’re safe.’
Out of nowhere, Ed felt something totally new: he craved the safety she promised.
From the word go, he had thought Cara was extraordinary. But when he’d been extolling her qualities to his brothers, Liam had laughed and said, ‘True what they say, right? Love is blind.’
After his fury had abated, Ed got it: to most people, Cara was unremarkable. But she’d unlocked his capacity to love. With that heart-rush of devotion had come matching vulnerability. He’d never wanted anyone else.
Cheating happened, he knew. Some of his friends were loyal, some had lapses, some were habitual fuck-boys … He had his suspicions about Johnny – not that he would ever ask. If Johnny was cheating, he did not want to know. Himself, though, he was a straight arrow.
The beers arrived and Ed filled Marcello in on his and Cara’s story.
‘Say something,’ Johnny said. ‘We think you’re very wise because you have a deep voice and a foreign accent.’
‘She is doing a rehab?’ Marcello asked. ‘This is a positive.’
But it wasn’t.
Ed had hoped some childhood trauma would quickly be identified and plucked out, restoring Cara to instant normality. Instead, the hospital’s recovery plan seemed to be a trial-and-error process where his wife gradually re-forged a relationship with food. Worse still, she’d become secretive about her ‘recovery’. All these years, he’d been her partner-in-crime in her overeating: hiding chocolate, retrieving it.
Now, when she was – allegedly – getting well, she’d cut him out. It hurt him and it scared him.
It felt that they were further away from each other than when she’d been throwing up several times a day.
Outside the villa, Nell waved her iPad above her head. Seriously, the Wi-Fi here was shite. It was the worst to bitch about Wi-Fi when you were in actual paradise, but she needed to FaceTime Lorelei to see how things were going on set at the Liffey Theatre.
She’d got the job designing Human Salt just after the murder-mystery weekend. It had done a huge amount to restore her confidence.
‘What’re you doing?’
It was Ferdia at the door of his little house.
‘Trying to get a signal.’
He opened the door wide. ‘My bedroom has the best Wi-Fi in the whole place.’
She felt awkward about going in there. He was a young bloke – God only knew what he’d been up to.
Ducking into his living room, she ran up the shallow stone stairs to his bedroom and tried not to look at his sheets or the clothes strewn on the floor. It didn’t smell too bad: no smell of feet or sweat or … self-pleasuring. Suddenly she wanted to giggle.
‘What’s so funny?’ His head