When confronted by Pete, he swore that he’d not broken his vows to her, and while this was technically true, he accepted the fact that in saying this, he placed himself among the rogue husbands who told themselves that being blown by a woman did not constitute having actual sex with her. For only actual sex equated to full-on infidelity, and actual sex comprised taking a position between the legs and pumping away. Anything short of that meant he could look Pete straight in the eye and say with impunity that “nothing” had happened between them. He’d wanted something to happen between them, true. He’d wanted the real something to happen, but as his wife did not ask him a question that would have required that admission, he was at least in the clear when it came to telling her an outright lie.
At first he felt lucky that there was nothing that would tell her who the other woman was. She was attached to a number on his smartphone, but the number had no attribution. This, however, had not presented a problem for Pietra. From his own smartphone, she texted the number with the message Ring me, it’s urgent, and when Teo had rung, her first words had been, “Darling, what’s wrong? Has something happened . . . ? Mark . . . ? Did you not just text me?”
So she’d heard the voice, and while at first she couldn’t attach that voice to a face, she did manage to attach the mobile’s number to a Teo Bontempi, with whom he worked. After that, finding her online had been child’s play. Nothing having to do with one’s identity was difficult in the age of social media.
“It was just that we were working so closely together,” was his lame excuse to his wife. “And then, there were times . . . There are times, Pete, when the loneliness . . .” But really, how could he finish up with that kind of reasoning, no matter its truth. Besides, she knew he had the occasional release—as he termed it—and she understood that “going out with Paulie” sometimes meant more than a few pints down the pub. Which, after all, she encouraged.
But this thing with Teo was different to paying for a massage’s happy ending. That, his wife could cope with. That, she could even encourage. That, indeed, was her salvation. “Going out with Paulie” relieved her of the double anxiety with which she lived: that Mark might one day leave her and Lilybet to fend on their own, that he might give her an ultimatum about making her body available to him, her husband, with a husband’s ostensible rights. “Going out with Paulie” obviated her need to worry, to think about, to plan, to . . . anything.
Still, her response to his excuse had astonished him. “You don’t need to pretend with me, Mark. I know how difficult all of this is, especially with me being like I am. And I want you to have a sexual life. I’m happy for you that you’ve found someone. I want you to have this.”
“This? What d’you mean?”
“The passion, Mark, the fulfillment, what you and I once had and have no longer. I don’t blame you for anything. This is helping you be good for Lilybet. And your being good for Lilybet is your being good for me.”
But now there was no Teo Bontempi. There was, instead, Teo’s death, and what it meant once “death by misadventure” had been altered to “homicide.”
Pete said suddenly and in a low voice, “I still can’t work out how it happened.”
For a moment, he thought she’d read his mind and was speaking of Teo’s death, something that he hadn’t yet shared with his wife. He didn’t reply.
She said, “Mark, are you listening? Did you hear what I said?”
“Sorry, love. No,” he told her. “I was in the clouds.”
“I said I can’t work out how it happened when the alarm went off. I left her for not even five minutes. She was perfectly fine. She’d been watching Beauty and the Beast again. You know how she loves it. I stepped out for—”
“Where was Robertson?”
“Just in the kitchen. He was making tea, getting juice for Lilybet. I stepped out of the room just to use the loo.”
“Did you not put the cannula in?”
“She’d been fine all morning. I was leaving her for a moment, only. The oxygen’s supposed to be supplemental anyway. As needed. I know it’s a safeguard as well, but that’s for the night, and I knew I’d be out of the room for less than five minutes. But then the alarm went off. Robertson reached her before I did. He put the full mask on her straightaway and started the oxygen. If he hadn’t been there, if he hadn’t got to her so quickly . . . One small mistake is all it takes and I’m the one who made it.”