Later, we drank whisky in bed, talked about the party and all the people we’d met tonight: the good, the bad, and the ugly.
‘Do you still love me as much as you did when we got married?’ I asked.
‘Almost always,’ you replied with a cheeky grin; it’s one of your favourite things to say. You looked so handsome that all I could do was laugh.
I almost always love you too. But I didn’t mention that I’d seen Henry Winter several times during the evening, wearing his trademark tweed jacket, bow tie, and a strange expression on his heavily lined face. He looked older than he does in his author photos. With his thick white hair, blue eyes, and extremely pale skin, it was a bit like seeing a ghost. I didn’t tell you that your favourite author had been staring in our direction, constantly following us around the party, desperately trying to get your attention.
Three years and so many secrets.
Are there things that you keep from me too?
All my love,
Your wife
xx
Amelia
Adam laughs when the sheep outside the chapel door start bleating. Even I find it hard not to smile as he drags Bob – who is still barking like mad – back inside.
When we first saw the multiple sets of eyes staring in our direction, it felt like a scene from a scary movie, but Adam’s torch soon revealed that the only nosy neighbours lurking outside the chapel were the small flock of sheep we drove past on the track earlier. They probably followed us here hoping someone might feed them. In the dark, their bodies blended in with the thick blanket of white snow that has covered everything since we arrived, so that all we could see were their eyes.
‘We’ll laugh about this one day,’ Adam says, taking off his coat again.
I’m not so sure about that.
I keep my jacket on – I’m freezing – and watch as he locks the front doors with a giant old key. I’ve never seen it before, but I’m so tired, maybe it was there the whole time and I just didn’t notice. I’ve been planning this trip for so long, I couldn’t wait to get away and practically bullied him into coming here, but now I feel strangely homesick.
Adam is a self-confessed hermit. He is happiest in his writing shed with his characters, disappearing so far inside the imaginary world in his head, he sometimes struggles to find his way back. I swear we’d never go anywhere if it weren’t for me. He’s proud of our home, so am I, but that doesn’t mean we should never leave it. The detached, double-fronted, Victorian house in Hampstead Village is a long way from the council estate he grew up on, but Adam doesn’t tell people about that part of his past. He doesn’t just rewrite his own history, he deletes it.
I don’t always feel like I belong in such an affluent corner of London, but he fits right in, despite leaving school at sixteen to work in a cinema, with too much ambition and too few GCSEs. But everyone loves a trier, and Adam has never learned how to give up. There is a theatre director two doors down from our house, a newsreader on our right, and an Oscar-nominated actress lives next door on the left. It can be intimidating: worrying who I might bump into when I walk the dog. I have little in common with our self-made neighbours, unlike my husband. Not that I have anything against social climbers – I’ve always found the higher you climb in life the better the view. But sometimes his success makes me feel like a failure. Adam is the real deal these days, whereas I’m still more of a first draft; a work in progress.
He kisses me on the forehead then. It’s so gentle, like a parent kissing a child goodnight before turning off the lights. There have been so many times recently when he has made me feel as though I’m not good enough. But maybe I’ve been projecting my own insecurities. Maybe he does still care.
‘There’s no need to feel embarrassed,’ he says, and I worry that I might have been thinking out loud.
‘About what?’
‘Imagining a face in the window and smashing that rather lovely bottle of wine.’ He smiles at me and I make my face smile back, until he says, ‘You just need to relax.’
Whenever my husband tells me to relax it tends to have the opposite effect. I don’t say anything – he wouldn’t take me seriously if I did – but I don’t think I imagined the face in the window. Unlike him, I live in reality, full-time. I’m sure of what I saw, almost certain, and I can’t seem to shake the feeling of being watched.
Robin
Robin stepped back from the chapel window as soon as the woman inside saw her, but it was too late. When she started to scream, Robin ran.