Ed’s brother Liam answers the door to their bungalow in pyjamas and dressing gown with a golf club badly concealed behind him. The walls in the hall have been stripped bare.
‘Scarlett! What the hell? Come in. Jesus.’
He opens the door but then he gives me the once-over.
I’m not sure he’s yet entirely unconvinced that he doesn’t need the golf club. Probably wise; you have just opened your door in the early hours to a woman who drunk-drove here after her recent attempt to strangle her friend.
How did I get here, I think? How did I wander so far from my dinner parties – albeit bought in because nobody changes that much and I always was a terrible cook – and my fancy brownies to this?
I had done such a good job.
Worked so hard.
I try to tell Liam what has happened, there in my pyjamas, with words and sentences falling out of mouth unevenly, in the wrong order. But I can’t see clearly. Can’t remember it all. Feel like I may faint.
The words jumble and collide and climb over each other. I try to straighten them up but don’t have the capacity.
I don’t sound sane – I know that.
Liam backs away, looks nervous.
‘Scarlett, Scarlett, okay, calm down,’ he says, edging away from me.
‘Ed! Get up. Scarlett is here. I’m not sure what’s going on.’
A bedroom door opens and Ed bustles down the hall in his pants and a T-shirt.
Liam places a gentle hand on his brother’s shoulder. Leaves. Comes back a few seconds later with a towel which he passes to Ed rather than me, then heads down the hall, closing his and his wife’s bedroom door audibly and leaving us to it.
Ed and I look at each other. And I think I have run out of emotions to feel. Is that possible? To exhaust them all and be hollowed out?
I am done feeling it all and dealing with it and analysing it and trying to save it. I am done tending and lamenting and blaming.
‘Why didn’t you answer my calls earlier?’ I say quietly. Ed doesn’t miss a beat.
‘I turned my phone off, Scarlett,’ he says, as he silently pats me and my pyjamas dry in the hall like I’m a wet dog. ‘I needed an early night and Poppy was in bed with me. I didn’t look at it. What the hell has happened?’
I stand still, obedient.
Ed looks scared. He glances nervously towards the bedroom door, where Poppy sleeps. I try to move towards it and he blocks me, with an arm.
‘She does not need to see you like this, Scarlett,’ he hisses. ‘And it’s the middle of the night.’
I stare at him. Think about what he could have saved me from this evening, if he had just answered the phone to his wife.
‘So you didn’t listen to the voicemail?’ I say.
He shakes his head.
‘It was Emma,’ I say to Ed.
What follows is another diatribe of nonsense and what sounds like hyperbole as I speak of blackmail and coercion and a showdown in a WAG mansion.
‘I did flirt with the guy from the coffee shop but that was it, Ed,’ I say. ‘Nothing happened, I swear. But Emma thought I was sleeping with her husband Robert – Robert is Mitch, the guy from the …’
‘Video,’ fills in my husband, grimacing.
I look at him then, closely. His hair has moved even further towards grey lately, sticking up now as it does when it doesn’t contain product. It feels like months since I’ve seen him like this, sleepy and exposed.
I notice the lines around his eyes and from nothing, I feel everything at once.
‘You act like it is a terrible thing I did, Ed,’ I say. ‘Sleeping with other people such a long time ago. Shall we talk next about who you’re sleeping with now?’
Perhaps it wasn’t Emma. But what Flick and Martha said still exists.
‘What are you on about?’ he says but he’s always been a terrible liar and now is no different. His cheeks colour; his voice shakes.
‘Can I ask you something, Ed?’ I say, calmer now, somehow. ‘Would you have supported me more if you weren’t seeing someone else? Or was the video enough to kill us dead anyway?’
Ed sighs. ‘Sleeping with someone else?’ he says but the cheeks are redder, the vibrations more audible. ‘Who am I supposed to be sleeping with?’
‘I don’t know, Ed,’ I say. ‘You would know that, not me. Someone from the gym?’
He refutes and blusters. Then he pauses. ‘And also, I did support you!’ he says. ‘I got you a lawyer’s appointment, went there with you.’
You, you, you. Still no we.
‘I was having a crisis, Ed. You’re my husband. That’s the 101 level,’ I say. ‘I needed emotional support, comfort, love, a hug to tell me everything was going to be okay.’
He ducks his head because he knows he can’t claim to have given those things.
‘You didn’t comfort me, Ed. You never comforted me.’
‘Well aren’t I the worst husband?’ he mutters. ‘You’ve not exactly been perfect, Scarlett.’
That inflames me again. ‘Somebody has just tried to blackmail me, do you understand?’ I yell, and he hisses at me to quieten down. All the bedrooms are on the same floor as us. If I shout like this I’ll wake Poppy. I’ll wake Liam again. I’ll wake Liam’s wife and their three kids.
‘I don’t give a fuck, Ed!’ I scream. ‘I don’t give a fuck if I wake up everybody!’
Ed raises an eyebrow and puts out a placating hand.
Patronising bastard, I think, patronising bastard.
‘Let me get this straight,’ he says. ‘Emma tried to blackmail you.’
‘No,’
