The Other Us. Fiona Harper

still half full. I want to reach over and slap it closed. ‘It’s your favourite.’

      No! I scream silently inside my head. It’s your favourite. Why can’t you ever remember that?

      ‘Wasn’t hungry,’ I say, then I leave the room. I want to slam the door but I don’t. I might as well have done, I suppose, because, a second later, Dan yells after me, ‘What the bloody hell have I done now?’

CHAPTER FIVE

      What if …? becomes an itch I can’t stop scratching. As the days roll by, I find myself thinking about Jude all the time. In my mind he has mellowed with age, lost some of that youthful arrogance but is still ruggedly good-looking. He wears cashmere coats and Italian shoes, I imagine, as I kick Dan’s muddy trainers towards the shoe tidy and hang his windbreaker on a hook.

      Safe bet? Hah! I put all my chips on Dan and yet he’s wasted almost a quarter of a century of my life. I think I hate him for it.

      I haven’t done any more digging into his secrets, although I know I should. I won’t ask him if he’s banging one of the perky PE teachers at school and he’s not asking me if anything is wrong, even though we’ve hardly said more than a handful of words to each other in the last few days. I feel like I’m in a fog; everything is fuzzy and boring and grey. The only sharp thoughts in my mind are the ones I conjure up about Jude. Those are colourful and sweet and juicy. I want to live in that place, not even thinking about Dan. I am an ostrich and my head is firmly down the hole of my fantasies.

      Becca comes into town on Dan’s ‘Thursday night with Sam Macmillan’ and we go for drinks. ‘Come on …’ she says, as we install ourselves at a table in the Three Compasses. ‘We’ve talked about it, now I think we just ought to do it!’

      ‘I told you,’ I say wearily. ‘I’m not following Dan. It would just be too … sad.’

      I don’t want to be that desperate woman. I want to be her even less than I want to be a slowing fading, middle-aged empty nester, and that’s saying something.

      ‘Not Dan!’ she says, although she looks ready to be persuaded if I changed my mind. ‘I was talking about the reunion – it’s next week. Next Friday. Let’s go.’

      ‘On our own? What about Dan?’

      Becca shrugs. ‘Someone mentioned in the Facebook group that they’d invited Jude.’

      I study my large glass of Pinot Grigio. ‘Really?’ I haven’t told Becca about how he’s hijacked my every waking thought since we last talked of the reunion. It’s strange, I think. Becca tells me everything – Sophie calls her ‘the Queen of TMI’ – but there’s a lot I don’t tell Becca. I didn’t tell her about Jude asking me to run away with him, not back at the time and not even now. I also didn’t tell her I almost packed a bag and tried to track him down three days before my wedding.

      ‘You never liked Jude.’

      She gives me a little one-sided shrug. ‘Maybe I was wrong about him. I was wrong about Grant, and we both might be wrong about Dan.’ I see her eyes glaze over and her jaw harden. She’s deep in thought. ‘Bastard …’ she mutters, shaking her head. ‘Just when I was starting to think not all men were cheating lizards, as well.’

      I reach over and lay my hand on hers to comfort her, which seems topsy turvy but I get it. I haven’t been properly happy with Dan for five years. Maybe ten. But while Becca was stuck in her lousy marriage, she always held Dan up as the pinnacle of everything a good husband should be. She’s acting as if he’s let her down too. I don’t know if she’s ever going to forgive him for it.

      ‘Anyway, I think we ought to go.’

      I take a long sip of wine to give myself time to think. ‘I really don’t know … Even if he’s there, he might just swan past me with his fabulous, ex-model wife. Or worse, he might not even remember me!’

      ‘You don’t know he has an ex-model for a wife,’ Becca says dryly, then her eyes twinkle with mischief. ‘You don’t even know he has a wife!’

      ‘You’ve lost your mind,’ I tell her. Not because she’s suggesting a bit of payback with my first love. Because she seriously thinks ‘done well for himself’ Jude would be even remotely interested in me these days.

      ‘Come on, Mags. This is you we’re talking about. You won’t be doing anything wrong. It’s not like you’re going to drag him out of there, get a room and have your wicked way with him, is it?’

      While, technically, I know it will all be tame and above board if I bump into Jude at the reunion, I’m also aware how out of control my fantasy life has become in recent days. In my head I’ve done just what Becca said. Every time I think of it, my heart starts to race and I catch my breath. I feel like a teenager in the grip of her first boy-band crush. It doesn’t feel like ‘not doing anything wrong’. It feels as if I’ve already crossed a line I shouldn’t have done. I start to wonder if people who say that fantasises are harmless really know what they’re talking about.

      A voice whispers in my head, Dan’s already crossed that line. Why not?

      I don’t know that for sure, I reply.

      Only because you’re too much of a coward to find out, the voice jeers.

      I don’t have an answer for that, so I tune back into Becca on the other side of the table. ‘Please come with me, Mags?’ she says softly. ‘I really want to go.’ She shakes her head. ‘Stupid, really. I feel it’s something I need to do to put some of these ghosts behind me.’

      I feel my resolve gently slipping. ‘Can’t New Guy go with you?’

      She shakes her head, but doesn’t elaborate. ‘I really don’t want to walk into the room all by myself. It’s just … I’m not the same since Grant. He knocked my confidence.’

      I know that. I’d watched, stood by helpless, as I’d seen him rob her of it bit by bit, unable to do anything but be a listening ear until she was ready to leave him and move on. I thought she’d done just that. I thought she’d bounced back.

      I suck air in through my nostrils then puff it back out again. ‘OK. I’ll go.’

      Becca lets out a huge sigh of relief and that’s when I realise this is what the constant badgering for me to go has been about all along. I feel awful I didn’t realise that before.

      ‘That’s it, then,’ she says, draining her glass. ‘It’s decided.’

      When we’ve polished the rest of the bottle off, we book a cab to take me home and then drop Becca at the station and I give her an extra big hug.

      ‘Love you,’ she says and hugs me before I scramble out the car.

      ‘Love you too,’ I reply huskily, and then I close the door and watch the mini-cab drive away.

      When I get back inside the hall light is still off. I dump my handbag on top of the shoe tidy and trudge upstairs, then I get into my pyjamas, slide between the cold sheets and try not to wonder why my husband isn’t home yet.

      Dan and I don’t talk about it when we get up the next morning. I remember waking at 11.30pm and the bed was still empty, then again at 2am and he was there.

      We waltz around each other in a practised dance as we have our breakfast – me passing him a knife from the drawer before he asks, him handing me the milk out the fridge so I can splash some in my tea. It’s odd that we know each other’s movements so well we can do this without thinking, while another part of me is wondering if I’ve ever known him at all.

      We don’t talk about it in the evening either. Instead, we watch The One Show. When it’s finished Dan turns over to BBC Two. He doesn’t look at me, doesn’t ask if I mind, so I have to sit in silence and try