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FORTY-SEVEN

It’s Boxing Day and Martha stares across the table at her two boys, who both sit anxiously, neither of them knowing why they are anxious, picking up, no doubt, on her anxiety.

Alistair left this morning at seven. His mother had gone missing again.

The remains of the turkey lasagna sit on the table between them; the gifts from beneath the tree have all been opened, all the wrapping disposed of; and the champagne is still in the fridge because Martha didn’t want to drink champagne on her own.

It’s nearly five in the afternoon and her husband is not here.

And no, he is not answering his phone or picking up his messages and she has no idea if he is on his way home, or if he is still there, and why, she thinks, why the hell does he do this?

Every single time? Other couples aren’t like this.

Other couples stay in touch, drop each other messages, even if it’s just a thumbs-up emoji next to an Are you on your way home? text.

Suddenly Martha feels reckless.

She tells the boys she is going to the toilet and then heads upstairs to the bedroom.

She doesn’t give herself time to think about it.

She reaches into the wardrobe and pulls out Alistair’s medical bag.

She feels around for the shape of the secret phone, but it’s not there.

She’d known it wouldn’t be. She’d known he would have it with him.

Because suddenly she knows without any doubt at all that Alistair is having an affair.

She realizes that for months she’s been nudging this knowledge around her consciousness like a football, without ever seeing the goalposts, but she sees them now and she’s ready to kick it straight through them.

She goes to his jackets and trousers and puts her hands inside all of his pockets, but they come out empty.

Nothing. Not a receipt, not a coin, not a peppermint, nothing.

Even that, she tells herself, is a sign that something isn’t right.

Who the hell has empty pockets? She goes down to the hallway and feels inside the pockets of his coats and jacket.

She finds a poo bag, one of Nala’s pacifier clips, and, crumpled into a ball that she unfurls and smooths out, a receipt from a restaurant called Paddy’s.

Paddy’s, Martha thinks. Why does that ring a bell?

And then she remembers. Alistair took her there for dinner two or three years ago, before they had Nala, possibly just after they got married.

It was a cute little seafood restaurant in Whitstable, she recalled, with the most vibrant atmosphere, candles on the tables, graffiti art on the walls, and the owner himself had been there and had spent some time at their table chatting with them.

A very charismatic man, Martha remembered. Very charming.

She glances down at the receipt again and sees that this is not from the Whitstable restaurant where she and Al had been for dinner that day, but from another branch of Paddy’s just along the coast in Ramsgate.

She looks at the date and time—two weeks ago, 9:56 p.m., ￡55. A single bottle of champagne.

She looks at the diary in her phone to see what was happening on that day two weeks ago and sees with a white-hot flash of pure rage that it was the night Nala was sick, when she had to ask Grace to drive them to the hospital, when Alistair had come home the following afternoon telling her that he’d slept on a sofa in the staff room of the hotel where he’d been working.

Her head pulses hard with anger and she roars so loudly that Jonah appears in the hallway, still wearing the paper crown from the crackers they’d pulled half-heartedly over lunch, his eyes wide with concern.

“What’s the matter?”

Martha draws in her rage and her desperation and forces a smile. “Nothing, sweetheart, just stubbed my toe. That’s all.”

“Where’s Al?”

Jonah has become slightly clingy around Al since their heart-to-heart the week before, seeks him out, asks after him when he’s not there.

“I told you,” she says. “He’s gone to look after his mum.”

“But when will he be back?”

“Soon,” she says. “Maybe tonight. Maybe tomorrow. But soon.”

“I want to message him.”

She’s about to say no, her inbuilt response to protect Alistair’s stressful working life from the added stress of family, but then she remembers that Alistair doesn’t have a stressful job anymore and that he is currently with either a) his secret lover or b) his elderly mother, and in either case, there is no reason why his stepson shouldn’t be allowed to message him on Boxing Day.

“Yes,” she says. “That’s a good idea. Do you have his number?”

Jonah shakes his head.

“Here,” says Martha, “let me send it to you. Then you can message him directly from your phone. OK?”

Jonah nods happily and stares at his phone until Martha’s message with Al’s contact details appears and then he heads back into the dining room.

“Let me know if he replies!” she calls out to him.

“I will,” he calls back to her.

She turns her attention to the crumpled receipt again.

Then she goes to the browser on her phone and googles “Paddy’s Ramsgate.

” According to the Google results, it reopens tomorrow at midday.

She will be on the phone to them then. But in the meantime, she feels an unsettling wave of relief pass through her, as though she’d been waiting for this moment for a very long time, and now that it’s here, she can finally start to breathe again.