A Thousand Small Explosions

by John Marrs

  ‘I want everything that you want,’ he said quietly, and meant it.

  Then he stared at the table, afraid to look her in the eye in case she could see straight through him and realise the man she loved had no soul.

  CHAPTER 78

  BETHANY

  With just two days remaining until she began the next leg of her Australian adventure, Bethany was no longer as keen to leave Kevin’s family farm as she had been.

  Mark’s kiss had changed everything and ignited something between them. After loyalty and common decency had initially kept them apart, they had given in to their emotions and were making up for lost time by stealing as many moments as they could when nobody was looking. Bethany would accompany Mark to town to pick up supplies and hold his hand on the gearstick; their arms would brush up against each other’s at the dining table and she’d assist him in herding the cows into the sheds before fixing them up to the milking machinery. Every minute spent with Mark made Bethany’s heart want to beat its way out of her chest.

  He became an addiction she didn’t want to be free of. And the more she had of him, the more she craved. As she packed her suitcase and prepared herself for her forthcoming solo journey around Australia, the need to be with Mark was the strongest it had ever been. She felt short of breath when she thought of what the next five weeks might feel like without him nearby and an ever-growing part of her wanted to stay on the farm.

  Then on her final night, their kisses, hand-holding and infrequent frissons were no longer enough for Bethany. She slipped the silver band from her wedding finger and left it on the bedside table, then closed the door to the guesthouse and silently padded into the main house and towards Mark’s bedroom. Her hands felt clammy as she reached for the handle and she prayed to God he wasn’t going to reject her advances. But his door was already ajar and when she pushed it open she found him lying awake and facing her, like he’d been expecting her to come.

  Mark pulled the sheet to one side to invite her in.

  *

  ‘Come with me tomorrow,’ Bethany whispered in his ear, her body exhausted and her lungs close to breathless.

  ‘I can’t, it’s too complicated.’

  ‘Don’t you think I know that? I was the one who married your brother.’

  ‘And I’m the one who’s just screwed his wife.’

  ‘Thanks for putting it in such a pleasant way,’ she replied, pushing herself away from him, disappointed by his crass terminology.

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s not what I meant.’

  ‘It is and you’re right but you and I know there’s something here that’s bigger than both of us. Or am I the only one feeling it?’

  ‘You know you aren’t.’

  ‘Then why not come with me? It doesn’t have to be tomorrow, it could be in a week or a fortnight’s time. Just tell your parents you need to get away from here to clear your head. Give us some time together on our own to figure out what this is.’

  ‘Bethany, I’m needed here.’

  ‘And I need you.’

  ‘I can’t do that to my family or to Kevin’s memory. How can I tell people who came to his funeral two weeks ago that I’m in love with my sister-in-law?’

  Kevin’s use of the word “love” made Bethany blush and her body felt like it was burning up. ‘But if I feel the same, how can it be so wrong?’ she asked.

  Mark shook his head apologetically, threw it back against his pillow and stared up at the ceiling, as if waiting for divine intervention to tell him what to do next. When it failed to arrive, a frustrated Bethany suddenly felt awkward and very naked. Rejected and frustrated, she slipped her T-shirt and underwear back on and opened the door to go back to her room.

  Her eyes widened when she saw Mark’s mother Susan standing in the corridor, glaring at them both in turn, her face a mixture of fury and disappointment.

  CHAPTER 79

  NICK

  Nick’s appetite had all but disappeared.

  Each time he tried to fill his empty, rumbling stomach and consume a pre-packaged snack from his hotel minibar, he felt like bringing it back up again. So instead, he stuck to his diet of cigarettes, chewing gum and bottles of flavoured water.

  Nick’s initial reaction to discovering he was to become a father to Sally’s baby was to shy away from the world and check himself in the central Birmingham hotel room where he’d stayed when he and Sally first separated. Unlike Alex’s apartment that was littered with their possessions, cases and luggage, Nick hoped his judgement wouldn’t be clouded by an anonymous room. It would be a blank canvas in which he could sit and think, and make an informed decision on what to do next.

  Hour upon hour of silence and solitude followed as he stood facing the ninth storey window, taking in the city’s diverse skyline. But the most important discovery he’d made was figuring out that removing four screws would disable the safety catches that prevented the window from opening fully. The first two he held in the palm of his hand and he assumed the remaining two would be just as easy to turn with the teaspoon. It was a solution that would put a stop to him being everyone’s problem, he reasoned, albeit a drastic one.

  Nick chose not to respond to any of Alex’s text messages that afternoon. He didn’t know how to tell that him that instead of waiting for his passport to be renewed, he’d actually spent the morning with his ex-girlfriend trying to come to terms with the fact that he’d be a father in under four months’ time. As the tone of Alex’s unanswered texts became more and more concerned, phone calls and voicemails followed before Nick switched his device off.

  A gentle breeze drifted though the window and reached Nick’s face but he didn’t register it. Instead he recalled how he’d wanted children but Sally hadn’t been so sure. Eventually they reached a compromise and agreed that a couple of years after they married, they would let nature take its course and see what happened. But a drunken night on a city break to Bruges saw them throwing caution to the wind and now they were being forced to deal with the aftershock.

  ‘I’m not telling you I’m pregnant because I want us to get back together, nor to split you and him up,’ Sally had been at pains to point out, and he believed her. ‘I’m not even expecting you to have any role in its life either financially or emotionally, you just deserved to know.’

  Nick was pragmatic in his approach and worked through each viable way he could play a part in his child’s life and still remain with Alex. He figured he could still emigrate to New Zealand and with flight prices falling year-on-year, he might be able to afford a return trip to the UK twice annually. The rest of the time, he could watch his child growing up via FaceTime or Skype. It wouldn’t be ideal, but it was what thousands of armed services parents stationed countries apart from their children did. And Sally might also bring their child over to visit.

  It was too big an ask of Alex to remain in London as he needed to be with his sick father as he saw out his final days and Nick knew that if the shoe had been on the other foot, he would’ve put his family’s needs before his own too.

  They were other ways around the problem, but all of them ended with the same result. Nick would be a bit part player in his child’s life and that would never be enough for him. If he was to be a father, he wanted an active role in raising their child.

  But a worrying thought began to creep into his mind and frightened him. What if he resented the child for coming between him and his Match? What if every time he looked into its eyes, they would reflect the emptiness of his own? Nick shuddered.

  And the thought of not being able to see his soul mate for an indefinite period of time made Nick’s body ache. Not being able to laugh with him, be responsible for his gawky grin when he walked into a room, or hear him breathe as he slept made Nick feel physically sick. And if he felt like this while they were still in the same city, what would it be like once they were a world apart? Nick knew deep in the marrow of his bones that it would be too much to bear. Trying to come up with one answer to suit everyone was
like trying to push the tide back into the ocean with a broom.

  He swallowed hard and then glared at the remaining two screws in the window’s safety catches and closed his eyes. He had made his decision and there was no going back.

  CHAPTER 80

  ELLIE

  An agitated Ellie drummed her fingernails against her glass-topped desk and stared at a painting on the wall ahead of her.

  She’d spent £40,000 on the canvas two years earlier, purchased on impulse when she spotted it on an easel in the window of a Knightsbridge gallery. It was a painting of a little girl with huge green eyes, dressed in a blue coat, who stared from the canvas out into the world. Behind her, a group of adults stood with their backs to her, pretending she didn’t exist. The outline of her heart was barely visible from under her top and only if you looked closely might you see it. There was something about the forlorn expression in the girl’s face and in the depth of her eyes that Ellie lost herself in for moments at a time. Almost everyone failed to notice the child’s heart and Ellie had never felt the need to point it out. But Tim had observed it, in fact it had been the first thing he’d observed when he arrived unexpectedly at her office one day with a takeout lunch.

  When Ellie stared at the painting now, she thought of Tim and more precisely, why, like the girl, he had chosen to hide something from those around him that he should’ve shared. Ellie had eventually revealed everything about herself to the man she loved, yet he’d not done the same. Because at one point in the life of Tim there had been a male presence who his mother may have even married. And Tim had lied to Ellie about him.

  Ellie tried making excuses for him, deciding the mystery man had been abusive to Tim or his mother, and that it wasn’t something Tim was ready to address. Or perhaps he’d been in their lives for such a short space of time that he hadn’t been worth mentioning. Either way, a suspicious Ellie still required an explanation or it’d cast a shadow over their relationship that would surely grow.

  The simplest solution was to question Tim face to face but Ellie’s gut instinct was to find the answers herself. Besides, if she’d got it wrong, it’d reflect badly on her that she didn’t trust Tim, especially after she had lied at the very start of their relationship about who she really was.

  There was something else that had been gnawing away at Ellie that she’d been trying to ignore for the best part of a month. Now was the time to confront it.

  ‘Is something wrong?’ Kat asked when Ellie walked into the Head Of Personnel’s office unannounced. Kat noted an apprehensive expression on Ellie’s face.

  ‘I need your help and I need to keep this between the two of us,’ Ellie began and the two sat down.

  ‘Of course.’

  Ellie inched closer to Kat on the sofa and spoke quietly. ‘You’ve told me before that you pride yourself on never forgetting a face, is that right?’

  ‘Um yes,’ Kat replied nervously.

  ‘The night of the Christmas party, you told me you thought you recognised my boyfriend from a job interview here, only he had a different name - Matthew, I think you said?’

  Kat nodded.

  ‘How sure are you?’

  ‘Please don’t be angry with me,’ Kat said, her voice trembling.

  ‘I’m not, why?’

  ‘Because the day after the party, I went back through Matthew’s file and called up his interview notes and his CV. It was just bugging me that I might’ve got him mixed up.’

  Ellie’s heartbeat quickened. ‘And what did you find?’

  Kat moved quickly across the office, her high heels clicking against the marble floor like tap shoes. She flicked though folders in a filing cabinet, then passed one to Ellie with a white sticker on the front and the typed words ‘Matthew Ward.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I should have come to you sooner but I didn’t know how to approach you about it. There’s no photograph of him in here though. Each time I tried to use the digital camera that we always use to take photos of candidates, the picture was blank. I tried with my iPhone but that was blank too. I remember joking with him about it.’

  ‘Have you told anyone else about this?’

  ‘Oh God no, of course not.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ellie replied, then left Kat’s office and hurried back to her own. Ula glanced up at her from her laptop and was about to ask her a question but judged Ellie’s stern semblance wisely and kept quiet, watching as she closed the door firmly behind her.

  Ellie sat behind her desk, then turned off her mobile phone and iPad and opened the folder. She scanned a copy of Matthew Ward’s CV, then cross-referenced it to the details her researchers had compiled about Tim when she first learned the name of the man she’d been Matched with. Both worked in the field of computing but that’s where the similarities ended. Everything from the location of where they were schooled to their dates of birth, exam qualifications, home and email addresses and National Insurance numbers were different.

  Ellie felt a little more reassured by what she was reading, but her scientific research had taught her never to rest on an initial discovery or take a first answer as gospel. She needed to see photographic evidence that the Matthew Ward who’d visited her building some eighteen months earlier was not the same man as her fiancé.

  She logged into the online check-in system where visitors to the company’s reception desk signed in and out electronically. She checked the names of visitors on the day Matthew Ward had been interviewed but found no-one of that name.

  So she asked Ula to contact Andrew Webber, the company’s Head of Buildings Security, to request footage from the time and date of Matthew Ward’s visit. She paced around her office as she waited, looking out across the London skyline hoping her feelings of doubt were unfounded; that something inside her was making her jittery about their relationship and that she was actively looking for an excuse to doubt the man she loved.

  Once the time-coded security footage arrived in her inbox she played the files in order. Cameras covered the building’s ground floor entrance, lifts, the Match Your DNA reception desk and the main corridors, but there was no footage of anyone who resembled Tim.

  She rewound and fast-forwarded for the best part of an hour but saw nothing until suddenly, she spotted an inconsistency in the footage at the reception desk. The time-code at the top of the screen flickered ever so slightly to reveal that a full minute of film had disappeared. Immediately Ellie felt her stomach knot. Someone had accessed and edited the clip she was watching. It was the same for the images taken inside the lifts and the ground floor, they all missed approximately sixty seconds.

  The last folder she opened was of the corridor leading to the interview suite. Moments before Kat’s time-logged interview with Matthew, she watched in dismay as the man she knew as Tim appeared on the footage dressed in a smart suit, walking confidently along the corridor with a satchel over his shoulder. As he approached the final camera outside the interview room, he paused and looked directly into it.

  She felt her blood run cold when she saw him clearly mouth the words ‘Hello Ellie.’

  CHAPTER 81

  AMANDA

  Amanda was relieved to find Jenny’s house empty when she returned from visiting Richard at the nursing home where his family had kept him hidden away.

  She needed breathing space to formulate a plan before confronting Jenny and Emma over why they’d lied about Richard’s death. But first she needed to get out from under their roof. So she made her way upstairs to his bedroom and fought the urge to cry again, concerned about the effect her afternoon of stress might be having on her baby.

  What had begun as an ordinary day and with so much to look forward to had fast taken more twists and turns than a James Patterson novel. She was exhausted and couldn’t wait to return to the safety of her own home and its familiar surroundings. The journey back would take around forty-five minutes then she’d lock the doors, slip into a deep, soapy bath and begin to come to terms with everything she had learned. In a cou
ple of days when the dust had settled, she’d visit her mother and sisters in the hope of making amends after keeping them at arm’s length for the best part of a year. Amanda needed her real family now more than she could’ve ever imagined.

  She yanked clothes from drawers and clothes rails, throwing them into two suitcases. Everything baby related was left where Jenny had hung it, alongside bags of toys, nappies and a stroller.

  The sound of the front door opening gave her a queasy feeling and she quickly slammed the lids of her cases shut and zipped them up.

  ‘Are you upstairs Amanda?’ yelled Emma, ‘We’ve brought some fish and chips from the takeaway as Mum couldn’t be bothered to cook…’

  Her voice trailed off as Amanda appeared on the landing lugging her cases behind her. ‘Is everything okay?’ asked Jenny, spotting them first.

  ‘I’m going home for a few days,’ Amanda replied vaguely, ‘I just need a bit of time to myself.’

  Jenny and Emma looked at each other, baffled by the suddenness of her decision. ‘Has something happened? Is it the baby?’ Is he okay?’ asked Emma.

  ‘No, the baby’s fine.’

  ‘Then why are you leaving? I thought you were happy here?’

  Amanda paused, debating whether to inform them of what she knew or keep quiet until she regained her mental and physical strength. As she scowled at them from the top of the staircase, she realised she didn’t know the two strangers below her at all. They had lied to her from the day she’d first met them and she resented them for every mistruth they’d sold her and every fake promise they’d made.

  ‘I know about Richard,’ she said slowly but firmly.