Rachel tries to shake off the feeling that she’s trapped in a waking nightmare, but the malaise is hard to shift as she imagines what she’ll do if she’s forced into a corner like that. She fantasizes that she’d stand up and storm toward Ali, knocking tables over as she goes, until she’s face to face with her.
“Do you want to tell your guests what you’ve been doing?” she’d scream. “With my husband!” She’ll turn on her heels, without waiting for Ali to answer.
She forces the scene from her head as she watches Jack pick his wallet up from the bedside.
“Why don’t you take some euros out of that and leave it here?” says Rachel. “It’ll make your pocket bulge.”
A split-second look of humor crosses Jack’s dark eyes before he pulls out a few notes and throws the wallet into a drawer.
“I know how you feel about her,” says Rachel, testing him. “But just remember that she makes your brother happy—very happy.” She says it in a way that begs to be questioned.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, taking the bait.
“Last night I discovered them making out in the pool,” she says, eyeing him carefully. “They were really going at it—and then she stepped out of the water, buck naked, to tell me that they just wanted something to remember each other by before he went to the hotel for the night.”
She watches Jack crick his neck as if trying to release the tension that’s building up. Knowing that Ali would so unabashedly flaunt what she and Will were doing, right under his nose, will no doubt make him feel like he’s in a pressure cooker. Especially if she went running straight to him afterward for a repeat performance.
“So, they couldn’t have waited for a few hours?” asks Jack, looking as if he has a bad taste in his mouth.
“Apparently not,” Rachel says, smiling. “And why should they? Would you, if you were with someone like Ali?”
His jaw spasms involuntarily.
“It must be liberating to be that young and high on life,” Rachel goes on. “I wish I was more like her.”
“I don’t ever want you to be more like her,” he says sharply.
Is that so you can keep us poles apart? she thinks. Have the best of both worlds? How does the saying go? A cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. Rachel doesn’t need to ask which one she is.
He takes one more look in the mirror at himself and shakes his head. “Anyway, I’d better be going.”
“I’ll see you there,” says Rachel. “Try and enjoy yourself.”
“Will do,” he says curtly, closing the door behind him.
She jumps in the shower, where her racing thoughts don’t give her a moment’s peace—the how, why and wherefores assaulting her from every angle. But by the time she steps back out, her overriding realization is that, twenty-four hours ago, every single one of the scenarios that are playing in HD and on surround-sound in her head weren’t even on her radar.
Sure that Jack is long gone, she pads over to his side of the bed and retrieves his wallet from the drawer. Knowing she can take her time to find any incriminating evidence to prove that he’s doing what she thinks he is, she carefully goes through the wad of receipts, placing each insignificant one facedown on the bed to ensure they stay in order. As she discovered last night, most of them are bills for innocuous items such as a meatball marinara from Subway, or a black-cab ride from Euston to Knightsbridge. But nestled in the middle of the stack is one so brash and loud that it literally takes Rachel’s breath away.
It’s not that, as a piece of paper, it stands out any more than the rest of them. It has no bright colors and doesn’t have bells on. But the words at the top send a bolt through Rachel’s chest that makes her whole body crumple. She stares at it—hard—waiting for the letters to change into something else, and when they don’t, hot tears sting her eyes, mercifully blurring her vision, but she already knows what’s there.
Tiffany & Co.
Her brain rushes to conjure up another retailer with the same name, that won’t mean that Jack’s spent two hundred and seventy pounds on a present for his mistress. But the words “silver heart” in the item description and accompanying barcode are hard to ignore.
She throws her hands on her head as she paces the room, unable to fend off the heat that is creeping around her neck, strangling her. She can’t do this; she needs some air.
Stepping out onto the balcony, she wonders how she can possibly hold it together. Seeing Noah, resplendent in a pale-linen suit on the terrace below, brings home the utter hopelessness of the situation, because whichever way she turns, there’s a reminder of the very deep shit she’s in.