Jade paled. Perhaps she wasn’t as tough as she made out as the idea seemed to upset her.
‘You’ll miss him when he’s at school all day, I bet,’ Maddie said softly. ‘Still, it means you could get a job, which would work in your favour for the custody arrangement.’
‘Yeah, I guess.’ Maddie handed Jade a wineglass and Jade drank half in one gulp. ‘I’m hungry,’ she said. ‘Let’s get Chinese – you got any money? I’m so skint at the minute.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Maddie said, the earlier nervous energy replaced by bubbling excitement at seeing Ben tomorrow.
*
Maddie watched as Jade poured herself another glass of sauvignon blanc. She offered the bottle to Maddie, but she waved it away. Her glass was still full, but Jade was knocking it back. She kept fiddling with a necklace at her throat, a delicate silver chain with a small lightning bolt hanging at the nape of her throat. It was very pretty, not something she would’ve thought was Jade’s taste.
They’d had Chinese food delivered and the empty plastic containers littered the coffee table.
‘That is quite a house you had,’ Jade said. ‘Your Greg does well, doesn’t he?’
‘He’s not mine anymore.’
‘Yeah, but I bet he could be if you wanted him. Sounds like he’s still very much in the picture.’
‘With Gemma having Jemima, that would never happen. He’s devoted to Jemima and they’re trying for another baby apparently.’
‘Why didn’t you have one yourself? Unexplained infertility, you said. What’s that then?’
Maddie’s stomach lurched, as it did every time someone asked why they didn’t have a family.
She swallowed. ‘We tried. I was pregnant a number of times, miscarried every time. Then we tried IVF, did the whole sex on demand thing, temperatures, ovulation charts, all of it. It became a bit like a business transaction. Greg and I were always so into each other, but after a while it was like my body was failing us and sex was just a means to an end.’ She swigged on the wine. ‘With every miscarriage, a part of me died too, until there was very little left. But we kept trying.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Jade said, unexpectedly putting a hand on Maddie’s knee. It was hot and heavy, not the least bit comforting, but Maddie let her leave it there.
‘It was shit. Harder for me than Greg. I think it’s easier for men to move on from these things because it’s not their body. Not that he wasn’t understanding or didn’t grieve because he did – but he had work, friends, a life away from it all, while being pregnant and having a child was my sole purpose and I was so single-minded about it that everything else became unimportant. I didn’t see friends. I stopped talking to Greg. It was no wonder he turned to Gemma really.’
‘Er, hang on! There’s no excuse for him turning his back on you to shack up with that boobed bitch. If anything, he should have been more understanding and stuck by you!’
‘I suppose everyone grieves in different ways though. I shut myself off. I was like a ghost and he was lonely. I don’t blame him and I wish it could’ve been different, but it’s selfish of me to expect him to put his dream of a family aside because I’ve got a faulty body.’
‘Wow, you really are something, you know that?’ Jade said with sudden venom and Maddie recoiled at her aggressive change of tone.
‘Tell me what you really think,’ Maddie said, diluting the criticism with more gulps of wine.
‘I am, because you’re making him out to be a saint! He should’ve stood by you, no matter what, not hopped into someone else’s bed at the first sign of trouble. For better or worse and all that!’
‘It wasn’t the first sign, as you put it. This all went on for years.’ Maddie was starting to get angry at Jade – for meddling, for telling her things she already knew but didn’t want to hear. But she couldn’t be angry at Greg, mostly because she didn’t feel much other than sadness when she thought about her marriage. The whole experience of it was cloaked in a thin, grimy layer of disappointment like a lingering bitter aftertaste from a pill. There had been so much promise that it had left a gaping hole when it all collapsed in on itself. All of it had engulfed Maddie for so long that she felt hollow. It took a moment to fall apart, but a lifetime to pick yourself up from it.
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ Maddie said. ‘This is a really tough subject for me.’ She drained her glass and refilled it straight away.
‘No! You need to start standing up for yourself, fighting back! He shouldn’t get away with it, Mads. They should both pay. Make them realise that we are not doormats for men to wipe their feet on.’ Her voice was brittle.
Maddie knew she was right, but there wasn’t much fight in her. She was trying to be more independent and taking baby steps away from Greg, but he kept drawing her in and a part of her still wanted him to.
‘It’s funny, I never thought I would end up getting divorced from Greg. When I married him, it was very much till death do us part.’
‘You said it – till death do you part. We can make that happen. We can make them pay without putting ourselves in the frame.’ Jade’s eyes narrowed dangerously.
Maddie sighed. ‘What are you on about?’
‘You know what I’m talking about.’ She leant forward and Maddie could feel spittle from her lips land on her face. ‘We’re going to get revenge on Greg and Mark. We agreed. You can’t back out now.’ Her face was a mask of bitterness.
‘We didn’t agree on anything.’
‘We did! We talked about it! We said that I’d kill yours and you’d kill mine.’
Maddie laughed then.
‘Oh God, Jade, I thought you
