The One Day You Were My Husband (97)

I stand up. I walk back and forth between the table and sink, sickened yet certain I will not let Robin steer this conversation. I will not let anyone steer a conversation that involves me and my life again.

“Did you know Johan had got out of prison? That he was back in Sweden? And Robin, do not bullshit me.”

“I did know, yes,” he says, as if this is irrelevant information. “But I—”

“Is that why you paid for my hotel in Stockholm? To make sure I wasn’t staying anywhere near where Johan works or lives? Is that why you were weird about me going in the first place? Why you kept saying you were worried it would be ‘too much’?”

“Of course not! That hotel was my treat. I wanted you to have somewhere easy to stay. Somewhere walkable to the conference. And I was concerned for your well-being he says. “It was a big deal for you to fly out there after all these years.”

I don’t believe him.

“We can work this out,” he says firmly. “Carrie. I know you’re extremely upset right now. You’re going to be feeling very emotional, especially with your father’s—”

“Stop right there.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Firstly, you will not use my father’s death to tell me I need a little lie-down.” I take a breath. “And, secondly, do not come anywhere near us until you hear from my lawyer.”

There’s an astonished silence. Then Robin says, “Carrie? Did you just threaten me with a lawyer?”

“You tracked me down and pretended to be a charming stranger.” My voice is stronger than I feel, for which I am grateful. “You tracked me down, Robin. That goes beyond stalking. That’s…I don’t even know what that is. But you can be clear about one thing, and that’s that the lawyer is not a threat. It’s a very sincere promise.”

Silence again. When he speaks, there’s a slide of condescension in his voice. “Um, Carrie. I think you’ve forgotten that you don’t have a lawyer. It was me who took care of all that sort of thing.”

“And I think you’ve forgotten who I am,” I say. “Although perhaps you never knew.”

Robin forces a laugh, but I know he’s beginning to panic. “Darling. I know this is all awful, but there’s so much I need to explain to you. I mean, the situation out there in Myanmar was deadly. My boss, Valentin, he was directly involved with the biggest crime ring in Southeast Asia. I’d have been dead in minutes if he stopped trusting me. I did what I did because I had no choice.”

“Everyone has a choice.”

“In this world, yes. In that world, no. But look, there’s so much you don’t know, Carrie. I did my best for both of you—I persuaded my boss to send a great deal of money to Johan in prison; he never did that sort of thing normally. I kept Johan protected the entire time. I intervened with your hospital trust so they’d force you to come home—I wanted you to get the hell out of there. Not because you were making things difficult for us, but because I was worried you’d somehow get sucked into it all and then I’d have ruined two people’s lives.”

“Oh, you definitely managed that.”

“And in the deal I did with the authorities I made sure the Thai police left you out of it, Carrie. I did that to help you!”

I hear my voice rise to a shout. “What else did you do to help me, Robin? Track me down and get a ring on my finger?”

There’s a long silence.

“Like I said,” my husband continues, when he’s found his voice again. “I never planned to fall in love with you. But just to be clear, you are not going to try to take my children away from me. I’m their father.”

I can’t speak.

“Do not give our children the broken childhood you had, Carrie. Do not turn into your mother.”

I end the call.

Johan’s still watching me. He doesn’t say a word, although there’s the slightest ember of a smile in his eyes.

I look away from him and come back to myself, to the quiet and streamlined space in my head. This was me in an emergency operation. One action, then the next. Never any bigger-picture panic. Just this action, now. It was what made the best surgeons, Yanika had always said.

After a few minutes I pick up my phone again. I have my next action.

I open up Google and type in Andrew Heynes Foundation redundancies.

I scroll through six pages of results before giving up. There is nothing there about mass redundancies.

Six months ago, Robin told me he and “countless others” were made redundant because his long-term boss, Andrew Heynes, had been charged with financial fraud.

No redundancies were reported at all. The Heynes Foundation is still going strong, and indeed there’s a picture of Andrew opening a new women’s health unit at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee just a few days ago. I have no idea why Robin left, but it had nothing to do with redundancies. And Andrew Heynes never committed fraud.

Briefly, I wonder why I never looked any of this up at the time, but I know the answer. I’ve never questioned anything Robin has told me. Not a word.

Johan gets up and turns the kettle on. He’s going to make another teh tarik; I know it. This is what he used to do for me at midnight when I was still studying. Workaholic Carrie, Carrie who didn’t always manage to eat a full dinner, Carrie who misjudged her work-life balance most days. He didn’t try to change that Carrie; he made no attempt to protect her from herself. He simply watched her do her own thing, and loved her anyway.