The One Day You Were My Husband (34)

Johan listened to my whole speech and then said quietly, “Carrie.”

I didn’t trust myself to speak. Tears waited, stinging, in my eyes.

“Carrie…” he repeated. “Is the patient OK?”

“She’s OK. They didn’t actually give her the antibiotics,” I admitted. “But I made other mistakes. They’ve been noted. It’s not good.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Johan said. “And I’m glad it’s all OK. But I don’t need to know anything about medicine to know that you’re great at your job. It won’t have been anything more than a moment of madness.”

“Mmm.”

“But that does not sound like a reason to end our relationship.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“This is because I didn’t call, isn’t it?”

“No.”

He waited patiently.

“Yes.”

I had never felt more ashamed.

“The oil rig didn’t have Wi-Fi, and the fixed computer terminals were in use all evening for the rig staff. They don’t get to see their families for months on end; I didn’t get a look in. I got hold of a sat phone to call the office just that one time, but they wouldn’t let me use it for personal calls. Carrie. Carrie?”

“Mmm.”

“Carrie. I’m finally back on the mainland and the first thing I’m doing is calling you. And I warned you this might happen. Please stop thinking what you’ve been thinking.”

I still couldn’t speak. It was rising up in me, now, the great fear of losing him. The terror of it. I hadn’t known it was there until he’d gone away and my judgment had vanished.

The first tear fell, and with it an old window opened. That first surreal, heady day after Mum had officially moved out. Me, running like the wind from Jilly’s car into her house. Jilly, who lived in our village and famously owned twenty guinea pigs, was to pick us up from school each day now. And even though Jilly had bought Smarties for me and Maya to soften the blow of our new lives, I’d ignored the chocolate, the guinea pigs, everything other than Jilly’s phone, because Mum was going to call. How was school? she’d ask, like anyone else’s mum would. I was going to tell her a funny story about how Debbie had fallen off the vaulting box in PE and landed straddled on my back as if I were a horse.

No call came. I transferred my vigil to our own phone when Dad picked us up later on.

I sat by those phones every day that week, until finally our own phone rang at 6:05 p.m. on the Friday. I knew why she was calling. I’d heard Dad yelling at her the previous night. I’d heard him demand that she call us, and I’d heard him list all the ways in which she’d failed us. I’d heard his every word and now, now I finally had Mum on the phone, I couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“Carrie?” Johan prompted.

I couldn’t speak. Grief rolled down my cheeks in stinging tears.

“Talk to me.”

“I haven’t been in this territory before,” I said. I tried to take a deep breath, but another shuddering sob came out.

“Hang on,” he said. There were sounds of activity, then his voice again. “Check your messages.”

He’d sent me a screenshot from WhatsApp.

Every evening, at around 11 p.m., he’d tried to text me. Next to each message was a red alert to say the message had failed to send. But he’d kept on trying. Every night—every single night—he’d written, I miss you tonight.

A whole page of it.

I miss you tonight.

I miss you tonight.

I miss you tonight.

I couldn’t speak.

“Carrie, listen to me.”

I listened.

“Carrie. I love you already. I…I didn’t want to say that on the phone but—there it is. I love you. I think about you all day. All night. You’re it. Everything.”

He paused.

“Are you there, Carrie Cole?”

“Yes,” was all I managed to say. But he knew what the yes stood for.

That night he came into the hospital to collect me at the end of my shift. He came with warm samosas and two cans of gin and tonic, and those polar blue eyes.

“I meant it,” he said. “I love you. Don’t bother trying to end this again, because I won’t listen.”

“OK.” I smiled sheepishly.

“And I’ve had an idea. I’ll have a two-week break in the middle of my Myanmar dive. They were originally going to fly me home and then back out again but it’s more cost-effective to keep me out there. Why don’t you fly out? We could have a holiday in Thailand. Or anywhere. I don’t care. I’m just not willing to be away from you for six weeks.”





Eleven.


Now: Devon, December 2022



Christmas. No snow, of course, but the cold weather has persisted and we wake to frost and dazzling sun, the air scalpel-sharp. The kids open their stockings on our bed in a luminous fissure of sunlight, lengthy shadows falling from their Christmas present piles. They look like something from a painting and my heart bursts for them, my chocolate-covered little people, shouting with excitement, pelting Robin and me with balled-up wrapping paper.

After opening their stockings, they run outside to smash the ice on the pond and Maeve, in spite of all our warnings, manages to fall in. She screams loudly all the way back into the house and then spends twenty minutes in the shower, water flying around so wildly that a vast pool forms on the floor and drips down through the kitchen light fitting below. We lose power in the kitchen for three hours while it dries out, which means I have to put the goose—our first ever goose—into the Aga. Christmas dinner is unlikely to be ready before the following day as a result, but Robin tells me it’s all fine and he’s probably right.