every bone in her body.
Now, she can’t shake off the ominous feeling that her complacency might be about to turn around and bite her on the behind.
‘No, a couple of us were there,’ he says. ‘Including the new junior reporter. You should have come; you’d have liked her. She reminds me of you when you were first starting out.’
Kate’s head feels as if it’s about to explode. She doesn’t know whether she feels relieved or even more suspicious. Jess is the girl he employed?
‘How’s she getting on?’ Kate asks.
‘Really good,’ he says. ‘She’s got a good nose for a story.’
‘What was her name again?’ Even she can hear the forced nonchalance in her voice. She holds her breath, waiting for him to answer.
‘Jess,’ he says. And in that moment, she flips the resounding question of, What the hell is he playing at? to What the hell is she playing at? There’s nothing to suggest that he knows anything more than he’s letting on, but it’s too much of a coincidence to think that Jess just happened to get a job with Matt.
‘You okay?’ he asks, as he comes back in and lies on top of the bed naked. ‘You look a bit pale.’
She nods, consumed by the unsettling feeling that Jess is up to something. There’s no doubt in Kate’s mind that she knows what she’s doing – the problem is, what is it?
Matt reaches across and pulls her into him, but although nothing’s changed between them, she can’t help but feel that everything’s different. If she doesn’t recoil from him physically, she ashamedly shirks from him emotionally, knowing it’s not his fault, but blaming him all the same.
‘You’d tell me if something was wrong, wouldn’t you?’ he asks, as if able to sense it.
‘Of course,’ she says, whilst wondering where she’d even begin.
As soon as she hears Matt’s breathing change, she slides herself out from underneath his arm, looking back to check he’s asleep. She pads quietly to his side of the bed and carefully unplugs his phone. Their pin codes for everything have always been the date of their wedding anniversary, and although they’ve often joked that they’re a criminal’s dream, right now she’s thankful that he hasn’t changed it.
There’s just enough light filtering in from outside for Kate to make her way into the living room, avoiding the brutal corners of the coffee table, to sit on the sofa. She opens up Matt’s emails and runs her eyes down the list, waiting for something or someone to jump out. She tells herself she doesn’t know what she’s looking for, except she does. As her eyes dart over anonymous names and meaningless subject headings, she can no longer tell whether her stomach is churning with nausea because she’s pregnant or because she’s doing something she never believed she’d do.
Kate is immediately drawn to the numerous emails from ‘[email protected]’, which prove that she works with Matt. Seeing the evidence that he was telling the truth in black and white is a relief. The content is innocent enough, as they bounce back and forth on news items and feature ideas, but they tell her nothing more of who Jess really is, or where she’s from. Kate’s eyes trail down the list, looking for something more.
She searches for Jess’s name and finds more correspondence under the subject heading of ‘Junior Reporter’. Sent from a personal email address, Kate is taken aback by the image that fills the screen as she clicks on the attached CV, shocked to be face to face with the woman who calls herself her half sister. There’s a familiarity about her dirty blonde shoulder-length hair, wide-set eyes and straight nose, but Kate tries to convince herself that it’s because they’ve already met. She will not allow the resemblance to Lauren to infiltrate her brain.
The covering letter, addressed to Mr Walker, is innocuous enough, with no mention of any supposed connection. As Matt had said, it seems she’d come straight from university in Bournemouth, where she’d studied journalism. Now, Jess says in her letter, I want to work on the country’s top-selling newspaper. Kate groans at the attempted flattery, before forwarding the email onto herself and deleting it from Matt’s sent box.
‘Kate!’
She jumps up, banging her calf into the ‘bastard’ coffee table and biting down on her tongue to stop herself from screaming out.
‘What are you doing?’ asks Matt. She can just make out his silhouette in the doorway.
‘I was just . . .’ she starts, as his