Also by Sarah Alderson
Can We Live Here?
Friends Like These
In Her Eyes
Sarah Alderson
www.hodder.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2019 by Mulholland Books
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Sarah Alderson 2019
The right of Sarah Alderson to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by her in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 978 1 473 68185 9
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
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To Theo and Clarissa
Contents
PART ONE
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
PART TWO
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
PART THREE
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Acknowledgements
PART ONE
Chapter 1
DAY 1
A sledgehammer slams into my chest, splintering my ribs. In its wake comes a lightning bolt of pain.
‘Ava!’ Someone is shouting my name over and over, but I can’t see who. The fog deepens, darkens. Cold, bony fingers are snaking around my throat, sliding over my mouth, clamping my lips together – and I start to panic. I can’t breathe. But the harder I fight, the more tightly I’m held. What’s happening? Where am I? Where’s June?
June. Her name rises up in front of me and I snatch for it, grasp it tightly, as though it’s a flashlight that will light a path out of the fog. June. Not just a name or a promise of summer. A face too; dark hair, deep blue eyes, freckles scattered across her cheeks – one on her lip that looks like a chocolate sprinkle. She’s smiling. She’s always smiling. I reach for her, but she vanishes. I try to scream her name but I can’t open my mouth. Fear surges through me. I need to reach her and so I start to fight – kicking and punching with every ounce of strength left in me, trying to get free, but it’s impossible.
It hits me then that June’s dead. And if she is, then I want to be too. I stop fighting and let the fog pour into my ears. It kills all sound and then it rams its fists into my eyes and blinds me. It’s a darkness so complete I might as well be encased in lead, free-falling to the bottom of the ocean.
Gratefully, I let myself sink.
Chapter 2
DAY 1: Earlier
‘An affair?’
Laurie hands me the olive from her martini and nods.
‘You honestly think Dave’s having an affair?’ I ask her, shaking my head in astonishment. I can’t believe it for a moment. It’s absurd. It would be easier to believe he was Grand Wizard of the KKK.
Laurie downs her drink in one swallow. ‘He’s been acting shifty for months, working late, refusing to open up and talk to me.’
‘How’s that any different to normal?’ I ask, and immediately realize I shouldn’t be making light of it. Laurie’s serious. I reach across the table and take her hand. ‘I’m sorry, I’m just finding it hard to imagine.’
She forces a terse smile and signals the waiter for another martini.
Now I get why she sounded so tearful when she called and begged me to meet her. I was meant to be having dinner with Robert. He’d arranged a special date night for our anniversary completely out of the blue (admitting to me that Hannah had reminded him). But given the last time he asked me out was about three hundred years ago, I had been looking forward to it. He wasn’t at all happy when I postponed. But Laurie has been there for me through so many ups and downs; I couldn’t not be there for her in her hour of need.
‘Do you have any proof?’ I ask Laurie, still incredulous.
‘What? Lipstick on his collar? Credit card receipts for a Motel 8?’ She shakes her head. ‘No. I just know there’s something going on.’
I take a big gulp of my wine and try to process what Laurie is telling me, but I just can’t. Dave’s Dave. If the Jeopardy answer was ‘Dependable’, the question would be ‘What is Dave?’ He and Laurie have been together for fifteen years. I was maid of honor at their wedding and I’m godmother to their son, Cory, who has just started college.
There are lots of our friends’ husbands who I’d lay money on playing away from home – in a small town like ours rumors fly like the winged monkeys in Oz – but not Dave. No way. It took him two years to pluck up the courage to ask Laurie out, and even then he made it a double date with Robert and me because he was worried he’d be too nervous to talk to her if he was on his own.
‘Are you sure you’re not just jumping to conclusions?’ I ask Laurie. ‘It doesn’t sound like the Dave I know.’
She snorts. ‘How well do we ever really know anyone?’ she asks, arching an eyebrow.
I ponder that.
‘He’s acting different,’ Laurie goes on. ‘He’s started taking care of himself. He gets up every morning at the crack of dawn and does this seven-minute workout thing.’
I stare at her blankly.
‘Siri barks orders at you as you do jumping jacks,’ she explains. ‘It’s some mid-life crisis app that someone out there is getting extremely rich off of.’ She glances my way for a beat, almost apologetic, before shrugging it off and moving swiftly on. ‘And the other day I found all these bottles in the bathroom cabinet – pills and oils and ointments.’
‘Pills?’ I ask.
She taps her head and automatically I think she’s talking about anti-depressants. I know Dave was on them before, but these days who isn’t? Doctors are handing them out like candy.
‘For his hair,’ Laurie clarifie
s. ‘To make it grow back. We’re broke and he’s pouring money away on snake oil to make his hair grow back. He’s been bald, Ava, for half his life. There are billiard balls more hirsute than him.’
I stifle a smile as the waiter lays a fresh martini in front of Laurie.
‘What did you think when I said pills?’ Laurie asks, glancing at me over the rim of her glass. ‘That he was taking Viagra?’
I give a tiny, non-committal shrug.
‘I wish!’ Laurie spits. ‘I can’t even remember the last time we had sex. I think it was my birthday. So when was that? Six months ago? And believe me, I think I exerted more effort blowing out the candles on my cake. And the cake was way more satisfying. And it was a vegan cake. Take a minute to think about that.’
I take a sip of wine and try not to think about that. Instead I think about Robert. When was the last time we had sex? Last week? No, last month. That’s right. It was after June’s school play. And it was good, definitely better than cake, vegan or otherwise. It’s always been good, if a little sporadic recently. We’ve been together for twenty-two years though, since I was a young and naive nineteen-year-old, so I suppose it’s no surprise that our sex life is in decline. The fact we’re still together and still having sex (albeit occasionally) and don’t hate each other’s guts feels like success to me, given how many of our friends’ marriages are hitting the dust and then the divorce courts. Besides, everyone’s sex life takes a nosedive after forty, doesn’t it?
I switch my attention back to Laurie. ‘So, Dave’s getting in shape, how does that equate to him having an affair? Maybe he just wants to be on a par with you.’
Laurie is forty-one, like me, with jet-black hair and an angular face that most people would call striking, if not outright beautiful. She’s tall and slender and has never had to work out in her life to stay that way. Unlike me. I have to work harder than Beyoncé at the Super Bowl to keep the weight off, which could be why I’m never going to get back to the size I was before I had kids. I’ve had to let that ambition go, along with a million others.
Laurie swallows half her martini in one go and then sets it down. ‘I overheard him the other night in the bathroom. He thought I was asleep. I get up to pee and I hear him in there, whispering, on the phone to someone, telling them he’ll be there, promising them, he just has to make sure I don’t find out.’
‘Maybe he was arranging something for your anniversary.’
Laurie scowls. ‘At three in the morning?’
OK. She has a point . . . but still. ‘Why didn’t you just ask him what he was doing?’
‘I did.’
‘And?’
‘And he told me it was a missed call. At three in the morning. What? I’m some kind of idiot now? I checked his phone the next day.’
‘And?’
‘He’d cleared his call log. Who does that? A guilty man! That’s who.’
Laurie huddles closer and casts a furtive glance around the bar. We live in a small town and everyone knows everyone, but The Oak mid-week is half-empty so we’re safe. ‘I think it’s someone from work,’ she tells me. ‘He keeps coming home smelling of perfume. Something cheap and nasty too, like a Vegas stripper might wear.’
I pull back to study her. Is she serious? Dave’s the manager of a local wine-tasting room. I know there are a couple of girls in their late twenties who work there; LA hipster types who’ve migrated north to our idyllic little valley and who all dress like they’re extras in Little House on the Prairie, but I can’t imagine for a moment that Dave has seduced any of them. Not that Dave doesn’t have a certain appeal – he’s got a brilliantly droll sense of humor – but he’s not exactly Brad Pitt. More William H. Macy.
Laurie digs in her glass for the stray olive and starts stabbing it violently with the toothpick. ‘I thought about hiring a private investigator.’
I almost choke on my drink. ‘Are you serious?’ I ask, assuming she can’t possibly be, because it sounds far too Hollywood noir to be something people actually do in real life.
Laurie doesn’t smile back. ‘Absolutely.’ She stabs the olive again, this time so viciously its pimiento guts spill out. ‘But I can’t afford it,’ she sighs.
My face warms, and I take another sip of my drink. Money has always been a contentious issue and I try not to bring it up when I’m around Laurie. I know she and Dave have been struggling financially but I’ve learned my lesson about offering to help. Not that I would ever offer to pay for a private investigator, because I can’t for the life of me believe Dave is doing the dirty. The evidence Laurie has laid out isn’t exactly a slam-dunk for the prosecution.
Laurie slips off her stool and heads to the bathroom, swaying a little as she goes. I ask the waiter to bring two glasses of water, and while I wait for Laurie to come back I think about what she said about never really knowing anyone completely. Is it true? No. I would know without a shadow of a doubt if Robert were having an affair, though I also know I’m probably echoing the words of every woman who’s ever been cheated on in the history of the world.
But there’s barely room in Robert’s life for the kids and me. When would he have time for an affair? He shuts himself in his study every day, emerging like a vampire when it’s dark to eat dinner with us, before returning to his study to work late into the night. So, unless Robert’s locked in there all day every day watching porn . . . I laugh to myself, but then I abruptly stop, recalling an article I read a while back about a man who was addicted to porn. He re-financed his house, basically bankrupted himself paying for cam girls – not even in-the-flesh girls, but girls performing on a camera, which seems like a monumental waste of money to me – and then the wife found out when she used his computer to check her email one day and got an eyeful of waxed vagina. But you couldn’t help reading the article and rolling your eyes at the wife’s stupidity for not knowing what was going on right under her nose. I’m not that wife. I’m not that stupid. I feel confident that I would know if Robert was having an affair.
I doubt he could say the same about me, however. Ever since June was first diagnosed with cancer six years ago, Robert’s become increasingly insular and uninterested in what’s going on around him. It’s as if he can’t trust the real world anymore, so he’s withdrawn into a realm of binary numbers instead; a virtual reality where no surprises exist, where there’s no uncertainty, and where there are no rugs that can be yanked from beneath his feet.
He spends his time working on his world-building app for kids; a world, I like to joke, in which he gets to play both architect and God. He’s so involved in it that I could have swinging-from-the-chandelier sex with Javier the gardener right outside his study door and he wouldn’t notice. Not that I would. Javier is about sixty and has hands like antique shovels.
My phone buzzes in my bag. I pull it out. It’s June. I answer it, feeling the usual gnawing anxiety I always feel whenever I think of her. ‘Hey sweetie,’ I say.
‘Mom,’ June blurts. ‘I’m sick.’
‘Oh no, what’s up?’ I ask, immediately looking around and signaling the waiter for the check.
‘I feel like I’m coming down with something. I’ve got a headache and I think a fever.’
Laurie reappears, weaving her way through the tables towards me. She waves at the waiter, holding up an index finger. One more martini. Damn.
‘Did you try your dad?’ I ask.
‘He’s not answering,’ June says, and I can hear the sigh in her voice.
Anger flares inside me. I bet he’s at home with his phone switched off, sitting in front of his computer. It’s always the same with him. Laurie’s had to drive me to the hospital both times I’ve gone into labor.
‘OK, I’m on my way,’ I tell June, just as Laurie sits down opposite me. She frowns at me questioningly. June, I mouth, pointing at the phone.
‘Thanks, Mom,’ June says, hanging up.
‘She’s not feeling well,’ I tell Laurie. ‘I said I’d pick her up from her sleepover.’
Laurie gives me a smile that fails to hide her disappointment. I slip my credit card to the waiter, hoping that Laurie’s too drunk to notice.
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell Laurie as I slide off my stool. ‘It’s really bad timing. How about we pick this up tomorrow? Brunch?’
‘I’ve got to prep for work tomorrow,’ Laurie slurs. I forgot. She’s a teacher and spends most Sundays preparing for the week ahead. ‘Work,’ she adds, grabbing her bag off the back of her chair, ‘that thing some of us don’t have the luxury of avoiding.’
I sign the credit card slip and take the receipt, glancing at Laurie as I do and trying to shake off the jibe, which I put down to her being drunk. I link my arm through hers and lead her out the back to the parking lot.
‘I think I need to eat something,’ she announces, resting a hand on her stomach and swallowing queasily. ‘Do you have to pick up June right now? Can we get a bite to eat first?’
I shake my head. ‘I can’t, I’m sorry.’
Laurie’s lips purse as if someone is pulling a drawstring bag shut. I know she thinks that all I do is go running whenever the kids call, but I can’t help it, especially not where June’s concerned. It irks me that she’s even making a point about it. I fish out my car key. ‘Come on, I’ll drop you home.’
Reluctantly, Laurie gets in the passenger side, and I spy her surreptitiously eyeing up the interior. The car’s brand new and still has that chemical smell to it – a smell that Robert joked made his eyes water even more than the price of the car. When I press the button to turn on the engine and the dash lights up like a space ship, I notice Laurie’s raised eyebrows. I cringe, waiting for a comment. She doesn’t say anything though, so I put the car in drive and pull quickly onto the street.
Laurie flips the visor down and looks at herself in the mirror, grumbling under her breath at her reflection and swiping at her smudged lipstick.
‘Thanks for telling me I look like a two-bit hooker,’ she jokes. She flips the visor back up. ‘What time is it?’
In Her Eyes Page 1