‘Don’t you have it all on your phone?’ He took another step towards me, arms folded across his chest.
‘I tried to add it, but I couldn’t get it to sync. It’s fine, I’m done here.’
I closed the last calendar window and rolled the mouse to bring the view back on to the current month.
‘Let me see, maybe I can fix it.’
Mike reached out for my phone. The list of underlined dates from his credit card statements was still open and would be the first thing he would see.
I tried to grab it before he could get to it, my hand moving towards his, but I was too late – he picked it up and scrutinised the screen. My heart pounded in my chest.
Mike’s face melted into a soft smile.
‘Such a great photo,’ he said, holding up the phone.
I’d changed my lock screen to an old picture of me and Amy.
He passed the phone back to me. ‘Let’s take a look after dinner,’ he said.
I exhaled slowly. I hadn’t even realised I’d been holding my breath.
Skylarks danced in the dusk sky above me. My legs were heavy, like they weren’t properly connected to my body, and the walk home took twice as long as usual. I wished I could move faster. Back at Puffin Cottage, my key clattered in the lock like chattering teeth. I shivered as I bolted the door behind me, shutting out the world for the night.
As I poured myself a glass of wine, I kept running over the possibilities. Had Amy known that Mike was having an affair too? Had she run into Phil’s arms when she’d found out that Mike was cheating on her? Maybe they’d had some kind of agreement – an open marriage?
Or perhaps Mike hadn’t been unfaithful – maybe he had just needed a night away from home once in a while? I could understand the appeal of escaping from time to time.
But who had he been with in Newcastle last Saturday? It was definitely a woman, but I hadn’t seen her face. I tried to remember the scene from the street that day, trying to recall the details, but the whole thing had happened in a matter of seconds. With everything that had happened since, I hadn’t asked Mike, and Hannah hadn’t brought it up again.
Still, there was no question that the folder of his credit card statements had been placed in that box in the attic quite deliberately, and I had to assume that it was Amy who’d put it there. It followed, then, that the lines marked the dates when she had been suspicious of Mike.
I ached for my sister in that moment. Not this Amy, who had been cheating on her husband, who had caught him out in a web of lies – Amy from before. From before I left, before Mike. The Amy from the time when all we’d had was each other. I focused on that girl, and the girl I’d been back then. I needed to find out the truth for her. For both of them. I sent Amy a message.
Did you find out about Mike? Did you know he was having an affair?
Adam had tried to call me. My finger hovered over the button to call him back – how badly I wanted to cry on his shoulder. But I needed to focus. I’d phone him once I was done.
The wine was making me fuzzy and I needed to be sharper. I took a bottle of vodka from the freezer and poured a small glass, downing it in one icy kick.
The Highwayman Inn in Alnwick didn’t ring any bells, so I googled it.
There were some mentions on hotel review sites which initially sounded promising, and articles about historical sites of the same name, but none of them were local. Nothing showed up when I searched the online maps, at least not in Alnwick. I tried ‘High-way’, ‘High Way’, ‘High Way Man’. Still nothing. The closest Highwayman Inn was in Durham, more than fifty miles away. In desperation, I called them, asking if they had another hotel in Alnwick – the receptionist was bemused by my question and politely told me that she couldn’t help. Had Amy reached the same dead end?
I wished again that I had her phone – surely there would be some record, somewhere on it, of her having gone through this same search. Would she have shared her suspicions with someone? Who could she have confided in? She couldn’t talk to her best friend, of course. Perhaps because she’d been involved with Phil, she’d felt like she couldn’t speak to anyone about Mike. I kept circling back to my first question – had she strayed first, or had she turned to Phil for comfort when she discovered what Mike was doing? My heart ached for Amy – as mad as I was, I felt so sad that she hadn’t had anyone to talk to. Not even me.
The timing was weird, too. The most recent page of the credit card statements was from October last year, just before Amy had changed her will. Nothing after that month. I went to look again at her letter. I had read it several times in my feeling-sorry-for-myself moments, usually looking for guidance on how she expected me to look after the kids, trying to read between the lines for parenting clues. There had been one part that had always stood out and hadn’t made much sense. I scanned the page:
…I am running out of time.
When I’d first read it, I’d thought she was talking about never finding the time to speak to me. But could she have meant that there was some other pressure on her? Some deadline? What had made it crunch-time?
Perhaps she had been planning to leave Mike. But she had broken up with Phil – that suggested she wanted to work
