At last, he meets her eye. ‘No, Rosie. I promise you. It wasn’t an affair.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It wasn’t an affair, Rosie. Because …’ He whispers, ‘I paid her.’
Rosie feels the earth beneath her tilt at a new angle and everything goes quiet. For a moment it’s a wonderful relief but then she stumbles, and Seb leans forward to steady her as Rosie hears herself scream, ‘You paid her? You fucking paid her?’
Somehow Eddy and Anna are there already, disgust twisting their mouths and Anna asking again and again, ‘What? What did you say, Ro? Ro! What did you just say?!’
Seb’s reaching for her now and she pulls her arm away hard, shouting, ‘Don’t you touch me! Don’t you fucking touch me,’ and Anna’s by her side again and she’s crying and screaming at Seb to get the fuck off Rosie and Seb’s saying, ‘Calm down, Anna, you need to calm down.’
Which makes Eddy lurch forward and, pointing a sloppy finger at his friend, say, ‘Back off, Seb. Anna’s just being a good friend.’
And suddenly Richard is standing at the top of the steps, outside the restaurant, and calling, ‘Oi, what’s going on? What about the bill?’
Everyone is shouting and no one notices as Rosie turns and starts to run.
She runs without knowing where she’s running to. Pedestrians step into the road to let her pass, shaking their heads at the unpleasantness, the shock of a middle-aged woman who has clearly lost control, a woman who should know better. Rosie doesn’t care. She runs until her heart screams and her body shakes. She realizes she’s close to the train station. She envisions herself getting on a train, escaping, leaving Waverly and everyone in it behind. It is the only thing she can think about, this need to leave.
It starts to rain, and she starts running again. The first ticket machine is broken. She kicks it and moves on to the next. Without looking at the time she buys a ticket to London and runs down the ramp to the platform. It’s only then that she notices that the platform and the one opposite are empty, that the whole station is deserted. The only movement is the text from the service announcements, scrolling along the station screens. She glances down at her ticket, realizes she’s just missed the last train.
She bows her head, the rain like tiny, cold kisses on her scalp, and she feels something break within her. She turns her face to the chilly night sky and makes a strange, high-pitched groan. Her rage is ancient and brand new, it’s hers alone and belongs to every woman who has ever lived, it is in every fibre of her being and it’s in every breath of air she breathes. It burns out of her in great fiery clouds, and she lets it, at last, at long last, rip through her. Her shouts and screams change shape, soften a little, and suddenly she’s crying, silent racking sobs that feel like they could crack the fragile basket of her ribs in two. She stumbles to a bench; it’s soaking, but she doesn’t care. She lies down, her cheek pressed against the sodden wooden slats, and she lets the rain and her tears fall together.
‘Excuse me, sorry, are you OK?’
From where she’s lying on the bench, she sees his sensible-looking black boots first and then his high-vis jacket. The security guard is young, still spotty, using a gloved hand to shield his face from the rain.
Rosie doesn’t want to scare him, so she sits up, her wet hair sticking to the side of her face. He bends down a little so he can see her. ‘Sorry, but you’re not allowed to sleep here,’ he says, loud and slow, like he assumes she can’t understand him.
‘I wasn’t sleeping,’ Rosie says, ‘I was crying.’
‘Oh.’ He takes a step back, rummaging in his pocket until he finds what he’s looking for. ‘Here,’ he says, thrusting a card towards her. It’s rain-splattered but Rosie can read the words, ‘Desperate? Suicidal? Alone? Whatever you’re going through, we’ll listen.’
‘The number is on the card,’ he says, still enunciating every word, ‘but you can’t cry here.’
It’s only when she’s standing outside the train station again that she realizes she’s soaking and numb with cold. The streets are empty now and for the second time that night she starts moving without knowing where she’s going. It’s a new loneliness, not knowing where to go so her heart can break.
She’s only been stumbling for a few minutes when a woman shouts from the other side of the road, ‘Rosie? Rosie, is that you?’
Anna discards her umbrella as she runs across the road towards her, Eddy a few paces behind.
Rosie’s too numb to push her away so she lets Anna hug her.
‘Shit, you’re freezing. Ed, take your jacket off. Quickly!’
Rosie can’t do anything as her own unbuttoned, wet coat is pulled from her shoulders and Anna wraps her in Eddy’s body-warm wool coat.
Anna’s hand rubs circles on her back; it’s supposed to be comforting but it just stirs up Rosie’s rage.
‘God, we’ve been so worried,’ Anna says. ‘Where’ve you been?’
Rosie shakes her head: it doesn’t matter.
‘Come on, I’m taking you back to ours.’
And with Anna hugging her arm on one side and Eddy on the other, Rosie lets herself be led like a fugitive with two arresting officers. Anna, with strange joviality, chatters away, telling her the places they’ve been looking for her, that they were close to calling the police, while Eddy, with his arm around Rosie for warmth, makes a phone call. ‘Seb, hi, we’ve got her. Yep, wet and cold but think she’s OK. We’re taking her back to ours. Yup, OK, I’ll be in touch later, then.’
As Rosie listens, she realizes that this is what’s been happening for who knows how long. Have her friends been talking about her, privately laughing – ‘Poor Rosie!’ – while she blindly blundered on?
She stops walking. ‘You knew. You both knew what he’d done.’
For the first time, she looks at them, notices the panic crackle between them.
‘Let’s get you warm and dry first and then, if you want, we can talk, OK?’ They try to pull her along, but Rosie can’t move; she won’t be their prize.
‘No. I want to talk now.’ She looks directly at Anna, make-up melting down her face. ‘You knew, you both knew?’
Anna glances, briefly desperate, at Eddy, who gets the hint and says, ‘We didn’t know she was a prostitute, Ro.’
‘But you knew he’d had sex with her, and you didn’t tell me?’ Rosie would shake them if she wasn’t so cold, wasn’t shaking so much herself.
‘When we were in the sauna, Lotte called. She mentioned that Seb went to the restaurant to talk with Abi. She said it felt like a row. That’s when we figured it out but, Ro, I promise, I tried to tell you earlier tonight – when I called? But Greer was there and … Eddy wouldn’t let me tell you any sooner. He wanted to give Seb the chance to come clean first.’
Eddy, sober now, looks sharply at Anna. Rosie turns to him. ‘Was it you, Eddy? Did you tell him to pay for the shag he couldn’t get from his frigid wife?’
‘Ro, no, please don’t—’
‘Tell me!’
‘I had no idea, Rosie. I think what he’s done is disgusting, I do. There’s no excuse. I’m ashamed of him.’
Rosie looks at him, sees the way he squirms away from meeting her eye, the way Anna is frowning at Eddy, and she realizes there’s no love here, not between any of them. There can’t be with all this anger and mistrust.
‘What kind of friends are you?’ She pulls her arm from Anna’s, moving away from them both.
‘Rosie, we need to keep going, please, you’re freezing …’
‘I’m not going with you.’
‘What?’ Eddy glances nervously at Anna.
‘I don’t want to be near you. Either of you.’
‘Rosie, come on, that’s a bit dramatic …’
‘Don’t you fucking dare call me dramatic!’ Rosie’s voice is a shriek. ‘You came into my house, Eddy, you were with my kids, and all the while you knew what he’d done and you said nothing?’