And for nine years, everything on her list had been ticked. Until it wasn’t.
He’d chosen their favorite restaurant, where the staff knew them. She’d thought it was a midweek treat. But afterward, as she unpicked it all, she realized he must have hoped she wouldn’t have a full-scale row in front of the ma?tre d’。 He’d been a bit quiet in the weeks before, blaming his moods on work, so Elise had put up her hair, squeezed into her little black dress, and put on lipstick. She could see herself now. Thinking she looked sexy.
Sitting across from her, Hugh had folded his napkin over his lap and looked back up.
“El,” he said, and stopped.
He looked so flustered, she thought he was going to propose and she flushed with unexpected pleasure. She’d told herself so many times that she wasn’t bothered. Every time a relative had asked her when she was getting wed. But clearly, she had been.
She leaned forward and smiled into his eyes. “Yes, the answer is yes.”
The shock on his face stopped her hand as it reached for his.
“No, wait,” he said too loudly, and a man at the next table glanced round. “Look, I need to talk to you about something that has happened to me. Something completely out of the blue.”
“What? Is it work?”
“No. No, er . . .”
Hugh had never been indecisive and she felt her skin prickle.
“Come on! My calamari is going cold.” And she thought she’d turned the awkwardness into a joke. But he hadn’t picked up his fork.
“Elise, I’ve met someone else.”
She sat there, her back rigid and aching from the tension as he spat it out. His apologies, his guilt, his struggle to do the right thing.
“Who is she?” Elise said when he ran out of words.
“You don’t know her. I met her running in the park. On my breaks.”
She wanted to stand and wail but her legs felt as if they belonged to someone else.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I thought I was happy. That we were happy. But we are all about the job. Maybe I needed something that wasn’t.”
It was her fault, then. She’d failed him. Afterward, she wasn’t able to remember the journey home. They must have taken a taxi but they were suddenly standing on the doorstep, outside their block of luxury flats, and Hugh was saying good-bye.
“I think it’s best I go now,” he said, like some romantic hero from a black-and-white film.
“Don’t try to be noble, Hugh,” Elise said. “You are shitting all over me and our life.”
He stepped back and stumbled off the step.
“Let’s not get nasty, El,” he said. “We can do this like grown-ups, can’t we?”
“Fuck off,” she said, and slammed the door behind her.
In the flat, she put the safety chain on to make her situation secure. Then she smashed his favorite Crystal Palace mug—the one he’d had since he was a boy—and left the shards in the sink.
“I’d have cut the crotch out of all his trousers,” Caro had said when Elise finally told her.
She’d waited a month to see if Hugh would have second thoughts but he hadn’t. He’d come back to collect his things, silently selecting paperbacks from the bookshelf and wrapping photos in newspaper. Elise had hovered. Not giving any ground. Not letting him think he’d got away with anything.
“Where’s my mug?” he asked.
She just looked at him. “Broken, like our relationship,” she said.
It was the first time he looked the least bit upset.
She’d kept her grief close, pushing it back when it threatened to break through. Of course she’d dreaded bumping into him, but she’d been careful and they’d been working different cases. And then he’d been seconded to another force for a project. So no more tiptoeing round corners.
She’d thought she was over it, but six months later, when she’d heard he’d got engaged, she’d taken a week off and wept and slept and then started looking for a house to buy by the sea.
“So,” Caro said, flashing a “Sorry. What could I do?” look as she turned on the recording equipment and rattled out the official script, “DI King, please could you start by telling us how you knew the victim, Charlie Perry.”
It felt so strange being on that side of the table—Elise could hear the questions she’d be asking in her head and had to stop herself from prompting Caro. She kept using police jargon as she tried to make it sound as if she was keeping a professional eye on her neighbor but she knew it was a pathetic tale of a sick woman spying on the folk of Ebbing.