The One Day You Were My Husband (69)

“Oh, Carrie.”

“Yeah.”

“Does he remember his surgeon daughter’s husband getting arrested on their wedding day?”

I try and fail to smile. “He did once tell me that story, yes. But he’d forgotten your name, and he had no idea it had happened to me—he said it had happened to a friend’s daughter. He told it like he was the village gossip. Scandalized tones, shaking his head, the works.”

“He didn’t remember the details?”

“No, thankfully.”

“I’m glad,” Johan says after a pause. “I’d hate to have contributed to a painful memory. It’s bad enough that you’ve had to live it all these years.”

Tiredness is closing in quiet and fast, like heavy snowfall. The shock is wearing off. Johan’s energy is focused entirely on me; he doesn’t look anywhere else. It’s me who keeps breaking eye contact.

I take a breath. “If you really can’t or won’t tell me anymore, I think I want to go,” I say. “I have two children and a husband. It’s not right for me to be here with you.”

And it isn’t right. I need to be there for my poor little Maeve after her trip to the head teacher’s office. And for my Raffy, who is without his mummy for the first time in his life. If Robin’s gone so far as to admit they’re struggling without me, things must be bad. I’ll get them while they’re still at the table if I call in the next ten minutes. My heart lifts at the thought of their little voices, their silly faces covered in food and pen marks, the illicit chocolate Robin’s probably let them have.

“I hope your husband is a nice man,” Johan says after a pause. “I hope he looks after you.”

“He does. Beautifully.”

“Good.”

“I know you’re a father, too. I looked you up online, of course. When I found your cabin.”

“I’m a stepdad,” he says. “Matteo isn’t my son. As he has reminded me more than once when I’ve refused to buy him sweets.” The ghost of a smile.

There’s an uncomfortable sensation in my chest as he tells me this.

“I’m going to go,” I repeat, standing up. “I’m leaving in the morning. And this is…I just can’t…”

Johan stands up, too. He watches me for a while longer, then nods. “I understand.”

I close my eyes. Twelve years of my life rewritten, just like that. I hold onto the back of my chair, trying to ground myself. I listen to the hum and clatter of the reception and bar, a shout of laughter disappearing into a stairwell, the sound of milk being foamed by a barista’s wand.

“Carrie.”

I open my eyes. He’s putting his wallet in his back pocket—the left one, as always.

“It’s an anniversary for us today,” he says. “Thirteen years since the day we met. Did you know that?”

I exhale slowly. Of course. A tall man standing in a corridor outside Major Trauma. Work trousers, paint on his wrist. Sky-blue eyes and a deep sense of knowing. The pull of that man.

“I’d forgotten,” I admit.

“I hadn’t.”

He moves closer and my body, without my permission, simply switches on. Briefly, I feel fury at it, this internal chemistry lab over which I should surely have developed some agency. But it’s very clear that I haven’t, that I can’t move away, no matter how much I want to. And I sense it’s the same for him.

“Take good care, Carrie Cole.” He reaches forward and gently kisses my cheek. It lands near my ear and spreads across my whole body. He watches me for a moment more, then thumbs away the tear that has sprung, against my will.

“There wasn’t a day I didn’t think about you,” he says. He removes a tear from the other eye. “There still isn’t. I loved you every bit as much as you loved me.”





Twenty-six.




I pack my bags and go straight to Arlanda airport, booking a new return flight on my phone. The flight stops in Munich and doesn’t land at Heathrow until nearly 10 p.m., but I don’t care. I need to return to my life, to my three loves, and that needs to happen without delay.

I drive up onto the moor just after 2 a.m., moon hazy behind silver loafs of night cloud. Stars carpet the vast black rising above the hills and tors; rabbits and deer scatter before my headlights. I find myself praying as I bounce down our potholed track, gorse glowing on either side: Please let me not have harmed what I have here. Please.

Even though the only thing I want to do is run up to my children’s bedroom, I go straight to the Pig Shed, which is empty this week, and scrub myself down in the shower like a criminal. My body reacted to Johan’s in ways that frightened me—I want to remove that energy. I am happy here with my husband and children. I don’t want any of this infected by my past.

Soon after, I’m in the children’s room, breathing in their sweet foggy breath, kissing their divine-smelling little heads. Raffy bats off my hand in his sleep, whereas Maeve, unusually, is sleeping neatly and peacefully, her hair in two plaits like Pippi Longstocking. Before I left for Sweden we read three Pippi Longstocking books. The kids made me promise I’d take them to Stockholm one day, too, to see the Pippi house at the children’s museum.