‘You know how you feel for someone you know who is hurt or sick or sad? Imagine feeling that for everyone. Not just everyone you know, but everyone. Every person in the world. All the time.’
I wonder if this is what that woman felt.
I close my laptop.
‘I’m not sure if we’ve heard the last from them,’ Gabe says a few minutes later, when he appears in the kitchen. ‘But I told them if there was any trouble, I’d send the big guns in to deal with them.’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘The big guns?’
He shrugs. ‘You can be scary.’
I get out another wineglass and fill it, hand it to him. Then I look out the window. The Drop is still cordoned off, the police tape flapping in the wind. ‘Did we make the right decision moving here?’
I expect him to say yes. I expect him to say, Of course we did, and then launch into all the reasons why. He is, after all, the one who was so eager to buy this house. But he doesn’t. I look at him. It might be the wine, or the fact that we’re alone together, but all at once the thoughts that I’ve been working so hard to push from my mind start to crowd in.
The fact that he told the police the woman was much closer to the edge than she was. The fact that the placement of his hands doesn’t quite make sense. The fact that I felt the need to lie about what I saw through the window.
All of it settles on my chest, like a cast-iron weight.
‘Gabe,’ I start, but he puts a finger to my lips. Then he takes the glass from my hand, puts it on the counter and hovers inches away from me.
I stare into his intense, handsome face. He’s wearing jeans and a white long-sleeved T-shirt that sets off his tan. He smells of the ocean. Usually, he tastes of it too.
‘Can we . . . not talk?’ he says.
With a few lines and grey hairs, he’s even more attractive now than when we met. My attraction to him is the one thing that has persistently refused to die, no matter how bad things got. I understand this isn’t always the case. Most women I know are always joking about it, or complaining, trying to avoid their husbands’ propositions. But for me, when things were bad between us, sex was what I missed the most. With Gabe, sex is always surprising, and always good. We’ve been married seven years now, and it’s only getting better.
He grips the counter on either side of me and slides a knee between my legs.
The thing about marriage a lot of people don’t understand is that you don’t get everything. Some people get passion, others get security. Some get companionship. Children. Money. Wisdom. Status. Then there is trust and fidelity. They’re the two you hear most about. In general, couples will cite trust or fidelity as their non-negotiable. In a lot of cases, a partner will offer one in exchange for the other. But Gabe and I have always agreed on our non-negotiable. Loyalty. Gabe has certainly made me work for that one.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Let’s not talk.’
I let him touch me until I lose myself in it. You’re not involved in this, I think as he lifts me onto the kitchen counter. You’re not. I say it over and over inside my mind, hoping that if I say it enough, it will become true.
12
PIPPA
THEN
In the first year of our marriage, Gabe had five jobs.
The first one, as a landscape gardener, he enjoyed immensely. There was something about being outside in the fresh air, watching a garden design come to life, that really excited him. In typical Gabe style, he threw himself into it with everything he had, believing everything he touched would turn to gold. I believed him too. He spent evenings researching irrigation systems and sustainable gardening. He had a good eye for the design side too, balancing the beautiful with the practical and low maintenance. Before long he was redesigning our garden, even though it was a rental, and spending each weekend at the local nursery, or outside planting and watering.
The first change came when he heard about an entry-level job that was going at a local newspaper. I was surprised, given his enthusiasm for landscape gardening, but writing seemed like a good fit for him; he thrived under pressure, and his ability to produce fast concise prose was exceptional. At first, he excelled at it, as he did with most things. He had a couple of stories published and the senior editor praised his budding talent. But only a couple of weeks in, he got into an argument with the same editor and quit on the spot.
‘It’s all political,’ Gabe told me afterwards. ‘Everything’s political.’
The timing of this coincided with a friend opening a franchise handyman business. Gabe gave this a try, but two months later he left, with grand plans to write a novel.
Within three weeks, he’d written three very good chapters.
In week four, he decided he’d been wrong to quit landscape gardening, and he returned to that. It was then, while working in the opulent gardens of a wealthy business tycoon, that he was offered an internship in a media organisation, NewZ. It sounded strange to people, a landscape gardener with no qualifications being offered a job after chatting to the executive, but it wasn’t strange to me. For Gabe, this was the way the world worked. It was exhilarating. He shone and the world welcomed him.
Media, as it turned out, was the job that stuck. It was all Gabe could talk about; all he could think about.
I’d never seen Gabe so dedicated. He took seminars, he read books, he met people for coffee to ‘pick their brains’。 He finished his internship at NewZ and then was offered a permanent role in the investor relations team. As far as I could tell, his department’s job was to convince investors to give them money to acquire other companies. It required lots of schmoozing and gladhanding. Since he was the most convincing person I’d ever met, I had no doubt Gabe would be great at it.
I was right. Within a year, he’d traded his check shirts and messenger bags for dark suits and shiny shoes and expensive haircuts that we couldn’t quite afford.
‘Dress for the job you want,’ he used to say, along with other business-type affirmations. There was something sexy about his commitment. It made me revise the image of him in my mind. He’d always been so dishevelled, so devil-may-care. This new, sharp, dedicated side of him was appealing.
He became more handsome, if that was possible. His jawline became more defined. The lines on his face gave him a rugged look. He looked like a film star. People noticed him. Women at work must have noticed him. If I ever teased him about it, though, he became serious.
‘You know you never have to worry, right?’
I did know that.
‘Do I have to worry?’ he’d say then, nuzzling my neck. ‘Is anyone paying inappropriate attention to my wife?’
But he wasn’t the jealous type, not really. We were happy. And I was bursting with pride.
‘Gabe’s working late,’ became something I’d say to friends and family. ‘His team is working on a big acquisition.’
It felt so glamorous and exciting. Then again, perhaps everything did when you worked in wills and estates. NewZ was in a growth phase, making acquisitions, building the brand. There were a lot of power lunches and after-work drinks. He was gone a lot. I was often in bed before he got home, waking in the early hours to Gabe sliding into bed beside me, his body heavy and warm. I understood. It was about networking, building trust. This was how business worked.