Page 63 of My Husband’s Wife

Sixty-Two

Nicole

Madison has stopped shaking so she snips away at Nicole’s hair. Nicole can’t help but think of Eva and how she now knows most of the truth.

She didn’t spare a second thought for Eva when she met Hugo all those years ago.

One five-minute quickie in a layby with him had resulted in her finding the real love of her life, Aaron.

At the time, she hadn’t cared that Hugo had a wife waiting for him back at their holiday rental.

She only cared that the stupid raven had unstuck itself from the dashboard and that it kept getting caught under her buttocks as they had sex in the driver’s seat of his car.

She and Will had argued that night, mostly because of her drinking again.

Will had left her in the pub, and she and Hugo had got on well, too well.

She left his car fifteen minutes later with only the raven as a reminder, that’s until she found out she was pregnant with Aaron.

She knew that Will wasn’t Aaron’s father but keeping that information to herself had seemed like the right thing to do at the time.

Madison gathers up about twenty centimetres in length of Nicole’s hair. ‘Are you ready to say goodbye to it?’

Nicole smiles and nods. It’s time to move on.

As Madison continues, Nicole closes her eyes and thinks back to after Aaron was born.

Nicole had tracked Hugo down online. She knew his name and found out that his wife had a baby before she’d had Aaron.

There was one particular post on Instagram that had been removed as fast as it was posted, but Nicole would never forget it.

It was a baby scan of twins; and Eva had called one of the babies Caiden and the other one Emily.

Eventually, she stopped looking on Instagram at Eva’s posts, that was until five years ago.

Nicole had the shock of her life when she spotted Hugo walking along the beach in Combe Martin.

She feared he’d come to blow her life apart.

She went online and saw that his wife, Eva, was sad at his passing.

Her obsession with him and Eva became more in real life instead of online, after that day.

Nicole had travelled up to Malvern many times just to watch Eva and Caiden.

Her dad, bless him, always looked after Aaron.

It had been his way of trying to make it up to her after leaving her when she was three.

While watching Eva, Nicole saw how sad she was and she wanted to tell her that Hugo was alive, but she still couldn’t be sure it was him.

Being wrong wasn’t an option. Instead she stayed a while that day, watching how Eva tended to the tree she’d planted in Hugo’s honour.

As soon as Eva had left it, Nicole had dug up the letter that Eva wrote to him.

She dug up the wedding ring just after Eva moved to Combe Martin, knowing that it could be used to unnerve Theo, or Hugo – whoever he was.

She thinks back to the nights she spent checking up on Eva after Hugo had died, wondering if she should contact her and deciding not to.

Eva has been a part of her life for such a long time and she didn’t know it.

Nicole’s fingers had typed out message after message, only to delete them after.

What if she was wrong about Hugo being alive?

The last thing she ever wanted to do was upset the poor bereaved widow, and she’d also have to upset her more when she told her about Aaron.

By then, her own marriage had been falling apart.

She and Will had been bickering for months but Will still thought Aaron was his son, despite moving back to Kent.

Nicole lost their house, then she struggled to pay the rent on the house next door to her father’s, so her poor dad had no choice but to take them in.

‘Your hair is amazing,’ Madison says as she begins a bit of fine tuning.

‘You’re making it amazing.’ Nicole thinks back to the moment when everything changed, the moment Zach came into her life.

While scrolling through social media in the middle of the night, she saw a missing person photo pop up – a man who was known to have been seen in the area – and she knew it was Hugo from the obituary photo.

There was no name attached. The nose and the slightly horsey look about him were two things that gave him away.

The mole sealed the deal for her. It was Hugo.

She replied, telling Zach that she knew where Hugo lived.

Ever since then, she’d helped Zach to try to expose Hugo; but the closer they got to Hugo, the more she took it upon herself to rile him up.

She wanted him to feel that his past was catching up on him.

Those raven sucker toys were easy to find online.

She ordered another and left it outside Hugo’s shed, then she left the wedding ring in their house.

She wanted him to know that he was about to be exposed, though she had never wanted to put Madison and Eva in harm’s way.

She’ll never tell Eva that she watched her for years, that’s just weird. And she’ll never tell her that she left the raven toy in her new house while Zach was at the DIY shop.

Nicole had wanted to trigger Caiden’s memory, which is why she’d left a little sticker on the toy saying, ‘My name is Emily’.

Whenever Caiden and Aaron played, she did her best to bring them together in the hope that when they found out they were half-brothers, they would also get to know about the sister they’d lost. In her mind, the toy would start the conversation.

Looking back on that move, it wasn’t her finest but she couldn’t go back in time and do things differently.

When the boys played, Caiden often said that he wished he and Aaron were brothers and Aaron kept saying the same. That is how she knew she’d done the right thing in messing with Hugo’s new life. Operation ‘unravelling Hugo’ had been a success.