The Best of Friends by Alex Day (accelerated reader books .txt) 📕

for the sound of his car tyres on the gravel drive, for the engine softly purring into the night. I need to be sure he’s gone because I don’t know what I might do if he tries to come back in here and sweet talk me.

Only when I’m sure he’s left do I turn out the light. I don’t sleep. Who would, in this situation?

I feel utterly crushed, all the stuffing knocked out of me so I’m limp and flimsy as a ripped rag doll. There’s so much emotion in my head that there’s none, because I simply cannot even begin to process what is happening to me, to us, to my marriage, and to my family. Everything I’ve worked for, sacrificed myself for, has been blown away in a single puff. I don’t who I am or where I am anymore.

It’s not a good feeling.

I’d cry if I thought it would help but I’m not sure it would make any difference. I’ve played it all wrong, done everything wrong – and now I’m here in this echoing house with no idea what the future holds.

My agony continues well into the small hours. I cannot get the thought out of mind: if not Naomi, then who? In despair, I text you. I just need to vent my feelings, to let out what’s going through my head right at this moment. Despite the fact that it’s 2am, you reply only seconds later.

This is horrific, your message says, but be strong and don’t do anything stupid.

A well-judged response. Because when I’m as angry as I am now, I don’t know how far I could take things.

Chapter 30

Charlotte

A couple of weeks have passed. I still feel at sixes and sevens, unable to settle to anything, my misery unabated. I’ve spent a lot of time with you – when you’re not working, of course. It’s September already and the twins are back at school, now joined by Toby. I let Dan say goodbye to him but I drove the children there alone. I couldn’t share a car with Dan, no way.

I thought I’d miss Toby like I’d lost a limb but I’ve been so distraught that I’ve hardly had the emotional space to notice his absence. The boys think Dan’s on an unexpected and extended business trip. The trouble is that Sam is still at home and his continual plaintive questioning, ‘When will Dad be back?’, ‘Where’s he actually gone though?’, his trembling lip, the incipient tears that continually threaten, all tear me apart. The fact that he’s here and not at school many miles away also means that, at some point, he’s bound to hear the rumours, the gossip I’m sure is already flying around this bloody village. My fury at whoever caused this hurt to my family quadruples by the day.

After not being able to cry that first night, I’ve made up for it since. I’ve sobbed and wept and howled and demolished boxes of tissues, leaving my nose permanently sore and red and chapped. Some days I just want to stay in bed with the duvet over my head and block the whole world out. As well as anger, I vacillate between sorrow and fear and self-pity and cannot settle on any of them.

It’s as if I must experience every horror, one by one, in excruciating detail, before I can move on to the next one and be wrung out with pain again. Despite all Dan’s previous betrayals, he’s never brought someone to the house before. To our home. Our bed. My nest sullied by some trollop, my bed sheets covered with someone else’s bodily fluids. Yes, I know I’m being crude, but anyone would be in these circumstances, wouldn’t they? I haven’t felt agony like this since my mother left us when we were children, and my dad died, a homeless, stinking hobo. I had forgotten that such utter anguish is possible, how much it hurts, how impossible it is to escape it, even for a moment.

And yet, despite all this, the understanding that I had come to in Corsica, that I love Dan and always will, that we have something together that’s too good to throw away, is always with me. However much I rage and roar, however injured I feel, however my feelings sway like the treetops in a hurricane, I am clinging on to the knowledge of my love for Dan. The trouble is that I’m simply not sure that I can ever forgive him.

In my hour of need, I’ve leant on you as a true and good friend.

We’re sitting in my drawing room now, the Japanese anemones, those flowers that signify the last days of summer, tapping at the window glass. It’s dark outside, rain clouds gathered overhead, waiting to unleash another downpour. The phone is right beside me but I don’t worry about it ringing anymore. At the end of the day, as far as my tormentors are concerned, it’s only money they want from me. They don’t want to steal my husband or end my marriage. So I don’t bolt for it when it rings these days, I just answer calmly and of course it’s always nothing – a friend ringing for a chat, one of the boys phoning to ask for money or permission for a weekend exeat to a mate’s house.

It makes me wonder if all my previous fears were for nothing, just products of my febrile imagination, like Miriam’s visit that day. That perhaps there never was a black car following me or members of the cartel tracking me down, that these were just ordinary people going about their ordinary business and I built them into evil persecutors. Even the phone calls could just have been automated ones from call centres where they dial hundreds of numbers at a time and only a small percentage of those who answer will actually be greeted by a real person on the other end.

Perhaps I’ve been worrying myself sick for years for