The Husband's Secret(14)
It was genius.
“Why didn’t you tell me on your own?” Tess tried to lock eyes with Will, as if the strength of her gaze could bring him back from wherever he’d gone. His eyes, his strange hazel eyes, the color of beaten copper, with thick black eyelashes, eyes that were so different from Tess’s own run-of-the-mill pale blue ones; the eyes that her son had inherited and that Tess thought of now as somehow belonging to her, a beloved possession for which she gracefully accepted compliments: “Your son has lovely eyes.” “He gets them from my husband. Nothing to do with me.” But everything to do with her. Hers. They were hers. Will’s gold eyes were normally amused; he was always ready to laugh at the world, he found day-to-day life generally pretty funny. It was one of the things she loved about him most. But right now they were looking at her imploringly, the way Liam looked at her when he wanted something at the supermarket.
Please, Mum, I want that sugary treat with all the preservatives and the cleverly branded packaging and I know I promised I wouldn’t ask for anything but I want it.
Please, Tess, I want your delicious-looking cousin and I know I promised to be true to you in good times and bad, in sickness and health, but pleeeease.
No. You may not have her. I said no.
“We couldn’t work out the right time or the right place,” said Will. “And we both wanted to tell you. We couldn’t—and then we just thought, we couldn’t go any longer without you knowing—so we just . . .” His jaw shifted, turkeylike, in and out, back and forth. “We thought there would never be a good time for a conversation like this.”
We. They were a “we.” They’d talked about this. Without her. Well, of course they’d talked without her. They’d fallen in love without her.
“I thought I should be here too,” said Felicity.
“Did you, now?” said Tess. She couldn’t bear to look at Felicity. “So what happens next?”
Asking the question filled her with a fresh nauseated wave of disbelief. Surely nothing was going to happen. Surely Felicity would rush off to one of her new gym classes and Will would come upstairs and talk to Liam while he had his bath, maybe get to the bottom of the Marcus problem, while Tess cooked a stir-fry for dinner; she had the ingredients ready. It was too bizarre, thinking of the little plastic-wrapped tray of chicken strips sitting staidly in the refrigerator. Surely she and Will were still going to have a glass of that half-empty bottle of wine and talk about potential men for the brand-new, slender Felicity. They’d already canvassed so many possibilities. Their Italian bank manager. The big quiet guy who supplied all their gourmet jams. Never once had Will slapped his hand to his forehead and said, “Of course! How could I have missed it? Me! I’d be perfect for her!”
It was a joke. She couldn’t stop thinking that the whole thing was a terrible joke.
“We know nothing can make this easy, or right, or better,” said Will. “But we’ll do whatever you want, whatever you think is right for you and for Liam.”
“For Liam,” repeated Tess, dumbstruck.
For some reason it hadn’t occurred to her that Liam would have to be told about this, that Liam would have anything to do with it, or be in any way affected. Liam, who was upstairs right now, lying on his stomach, watching television, his six-year-old little mind filled with giant-sized worries of Marcus.
No, she thought. No, no, no. Absolutely not.
She saw her mother appearing at her bedroom door. “Daddy and I want to talk to you about something.”
It would not happen to Liam the way it had happened to her. Over her dead body. It was the one thing she’d always known she could and would spare him from. Her beautiful, grave-faced little boy would not feel the loss and confusion she’d felt that awful summer all those years ago. He would not pack a little overnight bag every second Friday. He would not have to check a calendar on the refrigerator to see where he was sleeping each weekend. He would not learn to think before he spoke whenever one parent asked a seemingly innocuous question about the other.