Beside me Emma sits quietly, also studying her phone.
She’s got nearly two inches of hair now. She’s always had it short; short and wavy, sitting just at her jawline, but many months will pass before it’s that length again. Today, she wears it with a slim black grip. She is beautiful. Even after months of toxic medications, of killer beams fired into her body, of endless blood tests and tears and phone calls and quiet terror, she is still beautiful.
I lean over to tell her this, but my eye is caught by her phone.
‘What the fuck?’ I whisper.
She’s on Amazon, looking at coffins.
‘I want a wicker coffin,’ she whispers back. ‘If I die. And a natural burial.’
I stare at her phone, transfixed. The wicker coffin she’s looking at retails at just under ￡500 and is pictured in a sunny bluebell wood, with a posy of wildflowers on top.
‘Emma, no!’ I say. ‘Stop it!’
‘It’s lined with organic cotton,’ she says defensively. ‘Anyway, I’m going to be fine. This is merely research.’
‘Emma,’ I whisper, rubbing my forehead. ‘Please, don’t.’
‘We all die eventually. It’s much better to die with your ducks in a row.’
‘I . . . OK. Do what you need to do.’
A hot hollow opens in my chest. I really could lose her.
Emma, probably sensing this, puts her phone away and tucks her hand into mine, but I can’t stand it anymore. I march up to reception, ready to explode, just as her name is called.
Chapter Six
EMMA
The problem with lying to your husband is that it changes everything and nothing.
I love Leo. Not in a part-time or conditional way; it’s the real deal, an essential love, as much a part of my biological function as my liver and spleen. I love his Leoisms: the strange snacks he makes for himself, the meticulousness with which he folds clean clothes, the hours he spends trying and failing to play the opening bars of Bruce Hornsby’s ‘The Way It Is’ on my grandmother’s old piano. The way he looks at me across his long nose, in bed, and makes up filthy limericks as if he’s reading the shipping forecast.
I don’t think it’s any exaggeration to say he saved my life.
When I was pregnant with Ruby, friends warned that parenthood would erode our grand love affair. I understood what they meant, once our daughter arrived: the chaos and sleep deprivation, the sensation of being on the back foot – always, and with everything – the loss of adult conversation or intimacy; but I came out of that first year more certain than ever that Leo was the best man I’d ever known. We’d survived a cancer diagnosis, a pregnancy, postnatal depression, and yet there we still were, quietly walking in step. When we weren’t razed by exhaustion, we still belly-laughed in bed before going to sleep. We still kissed each other as if we were falling in love.
I was desperate to come clean with him; to tell him about the kind of woman he was married to.
But the reason I couldn’t was the same then as it had always been. Leo would never, could never, come to terms with it. There are a small handful of men who perhaps could, but my husband is not one of them.
And even if he were a different person, with a less complicated past – the sort who might be able to forgive what I’d done – he would never forgive my attempts to conceal it. Leo was lied to from the day he was born, and he can’t tolerate dishonesty in any form now. Last year he fired our nanny because she told us she’d taken Ruby to the park, when in fact they’d gone to her boyfriend’s house. By the time I got back that evening he’d paid an HR consultant to check that the nanny’s deception constituted gross misconduct, and had removed her from our house.