But perhaps not.
She tried to remember what she’d been doing the previous Thursday night, back home in Melbourne, back when she was still Will’s wife and Felicity’s cousin. She’d made apple muffins, she remembered. Liam liked them for his morning tea at school. And then she and Will had watched TV with their laptops on their knees. She’d caught up with some invoicing. He’d been working on the Cough Stop campaign. They’d read their books and gone to bed. Wait. No. Yes. Yes, they definitely did. They’d had sex. Quick and comforting and perfectly nice, like a muffin; nothing like sex in the hallway of Connor’s apartment, of course. But that was marriage. Marriage was a warm apple muffin.
And all that ordinary Thursday night, Will had been thinking to himself: I’m in love with Felicity. I don’t want Tess. I want Felicity. I don’t want this woman in my bed. I want someone else.
The hurt spread instantaneously throughout her body like ice cracking. She squeezed her legs tighter around Connor’s body and leaned forward as if she could press herself into him. When they got to the next set of lights, Connor put back his hand and caressed her thigh, giving her an instant jolt of sexual pleasure. It occurred to her that the pain she was feeling over Will and Felicity was intensifying every sensation, so that what felt good, like the swoop of the bike and Connor’s hand on her thigh, felt even better. Last Thursday night she was leading a soft, muffled, pain-free little life. This Thursday night felt like adolescence: exquisitely painful and sharply beautiful.
But no matter how badly it hurt, she didn’t want to be home in Melbourne, baking and watching television and doing invoices. She wanted to be right here, soaring along on this bike, her heart thumping, letting her know she was alive.
It was after nine p.m., and Cecilia and John-Paul were in the backyard, sitting in the cabana next to the pool. This was the only place where they were safe from eavesdroppers. Their daughters had an extraordinary ability to hear things they weren’t meant to hear. From where she sat, Cecilia could see them through the French doors, their faces illuminated by the flickering light of the television. It was a tradition that they were allowed to stay up as late as they wanted on the first night of a school holiday, eating popcorn and watching movies.
Cecilia turned her gaze away from the girls and looked at the shimmering blue of their kidney-shaped swimming pool with its powerful underwater light: the perfect symbol of suburban bliss. Except for that strange intermittent sound, like a baby choking, that was coming from the pool filter. She could hear it right now. Cecilia had asked John-Paul to look at it weeks before he went to Chicago, and he never got around to it, but he would have been furious if she’d arranged for some repair guy to come and fix it. It would have indicated lack of faith in his abilities. Of course, when he did finally look at it, he wouldn’t be able to fix it, and she’d have to get the guy in anyway. It was frustrating. Why hadn’t that been part of his stupid lifelong redemption program: Do what my wife asks immediately so she doesn’t feel like a nag.
She longed to be out here having an ordinary argument with John-Paul about the damned pool filter. Even a really bad ordinary argument, where feelings were hurt, would be so much better than this permanent sense of dread. She could feel it everywhere: in her stomach, her chest, even her mouth had a horrible taste to it. What was it doing to her health?
She cleared her throat. “I need to tell you something.” She was going to tell him what Rachel Crowley had said today about finding new evidence. How would he react? Would he be frightened? Would he run? Become an instant fugitive?
Rachel had never told her the exact nature of this evidence because she’d been distracted by Cecilia’s spilling her tea, and Cecilia had been in such a state of panic, it hadn’t occurred to her to ask. She should have asked, she realized now. It might have been useful to know. She wasn’t doing too well in her new role as a criminal’s wife.
Rachel couldn’t possibly know exactly whom the evidence implicated, or she wouldn’t have told Cecilia. Would she? It was so hard to think clearly.