Chapter 4

It was Rachel who texted first, now.

She noticed the change the way you notice the tide is going out — not in the moment, but afterward, standing on sand that used to be sea. For the first part of the arrangement she had answered his summonses with her jaw set, parcelling out the least she could and calling each grudging instalment a strategy. Now it was Thursday lunchtime and she was sitting at her own desk with her own phone in her hand, having already typed and sent, before any sensible part of her could intervene, Are you free tonight?, and she was watching the three dots pulse with a feeling she’d have been ashamed to confess to her best friend.

She’d stopped pretending it was for Daisy somewhere in the week after his flat. Not out loud — out loud the cover story stood, immaculate, maintained for an audience of nobody — but privately, in the small hours, she’d stopped being able to sell it to herself. A woman who is genuinely sacrificing her body to protect her sister does not lie awake replaying it, does not catch herself smiling at her desk, does not feel the day go grey and flat when he’s out at a client meeting and there’ll be no chance of him. The protection was real. It still held, technically; Daisy remained untouched, adored, patiently held off. But it had become the thinnest of pretexts laid over the actual fact, which was that Rachel Hartley, thirty years old, six years respectable, had developed a need for her sister’s boyfriend that frightened her more than anything in her well-managed life ever had, and had stopped, somewhere quiet, even trying to call it anything else.

Come over, he replied. No probing of the reason why. He never questioned it any more, and she’d stopped needing him to.

She told Adam she had a late one. She was getting better at it, which was its own small horror — the lies had stopped costing her the little internal lurch they used to, had smoothed into the easy currency of a woman who’d done it enough times to stop hearing herself. Adam said no problem and asked if she wanted him to save her some dinner and she said don’t worry and he said love you and she said it back, and meant it, in the strange compartmentalised way she now meant everything, and drove across town with her heart already going.

That was the part she could not explain to herself, on the drives. Not the sex; the sex she could at least file under appetite, under a body too long kept and now indulged. The drives were worse. The drives were happy. She would catch herself, stopped at a red light on the way to betray the man she lived with, simply and stupidly happy in a way she had not been in years, lit up from the inside like a girl, and she would look at her own face in the rear-view mirror and not recognise the woman grinning back, and the light would change, and she would go.

The firm’s summer party was held in a hotel function suite with a free bar and two hundred people in their good clothes pretending they didn’t all see each other every day, and Rachel, three glasses of warm prosecco in and standing in a knot of colleagues being exactly as competent and contained as she’d been for ten years, caught Cal’s eye across the room and felt the whole evening narrow to a single point.

He didn’t come over. He never came over; that was the rule, in public, the careful arm’s length, the colleagues-and-nothing-more. He just held her eye for a half-second too long over the rim of his glass and then turned back to whatever client he was charming, and forty seconds later her phone buzzed in her clutch. Service stairwell. East end, past the loos. Two minutes. And the old Rachel, the one who’d sat through a meeting with her phone face down to prove she could say no, was so thoroughly gone that this Rachel didn’t even feel the refusal flicker; she finished her sentence about Q3 delivery, set down her glass, and went, threading through the party with a pleasant unhurried smile fixed on, the picture of a professional woman going to find the ladies’.

The stairwell was concrete and cold and lit by a single buzzing strip, a fire route nobody used, and he was already in it, and the heavy door had barely clunked shut behind her before she was against the wall and his mouth was on hers and her good dress was rucking up under his hands. Below them, through the wall, the muffled bass and roar of two hundred people drinking on the company’s money; above them, flights of empty concrete; and between, Rachel Hartley with her knickers being drawn down her legs by a man whose girlfriend was her sister, eight weeks ago a woman who’d have died before so much as flirting at a work do.

“Someone’ll come,” she breathed, not as a protest — as a fact, offered up, because the fact was half of why her heart was going like this, why she was already wet against his hand, why she’d come at all.

“Then be quiet.” He got his wallet, the condom inside — her one held line, holding even here, even now, the single boundary still standing while every other one fell — and then he lifted her, one thigh hooked over his arm, her back flat to the cold concrete, and pushed up into her in one long stroke that she had to bite her own knuckle to stay silent through.

He took her against the wall fast and hard and quiet, nothing slow about it this time, no savouring, a man and a woman stealing something with a clock running, and she clung to him with one heel dug into the back of his thigh and one fist jammed against her own mouth and her eyes on the door the whole time, the door that anyone could push, any colleague, any junior who knew her, any one of two hundred people who thought they knew exactly who Rachel was — and the terror of the door and the thickness of him and the cold of the wall and the bass coming up through the soles of her feet all braided together into something so intense she came embarrassingly fast, clenching around him with a stifled sob, and felt him follow a few strokes later with his face buried in her neck.

They put themselves right in ninety seconds. She’d learned how, by now — the smoothing, the checking, the breathing. He went back first. She gave it three minutes, fixed her lipstick in the black screen of her phone, walked back into the party by the far door, and was handed a fresh glass of prosecco by a partner who told her she was looking very well lately, there was a real bloom on her, and Rachel thanked him, and agreed that the summer must be agreeing with her, and across the room watched Cal throw his head back laughing at something, untouched, immaculate, and felt the cooling wet of him still high between her thighs under her good dress, and had to look away before her face gave the whole thing up.

The Rome trip was legitimate, which was the only reason she let herself go.

That was how she framed it, anyway: it was work, real work, a two-day pitch to an Italian logistics group that Cal was fronting and that needed, for once, someone who actually understood the delivery model sitting beside him to stop him promising things the firm couldn’t build. She was that someone. She was always that someone. There was nothing improper about a senior account manager and the head of delivery flying out together to win a contract; people did it constantly; it was, in the cold light of the office, unremarkable. She told herself this with great firmness, and booked her own flight, and packed the navy suit that meant business and exactly nothing she wouldn’t have packed for a trip with a colleague she loathed, and resolved that Rome would be professional. Two days. Win the contract. Separate rooms, separate evenings, separate everything. She would not let the thing that had eaten her real life eat this too.

The resolution survived until roughly the hotel reception desk.

“Brennan,” Cal said pleasantly to the woman behind it, in the cool marble lobby, while Rachel stood beside him with her wheelie case and her professional face. “There should be a reservation.”

The woman tapped. “Sì — Signor and Signora Brennan, the junior suite, three nights.” She smiled at Rachel, warm, conspiratorial, the way Italians smiled at couples. “Welcome. Such a beautiful time to be in Roma.”

Rachel’s professional face did not move. Inside it, several things happened at once. “There’s been a mistake,” she said, level. “We need two rooms.”

“Ah —” the woman frowned at the screen — “I am sorry, signora, we are full tonight, there is a conference, I have only the one suite on the booking. It is very large, a separate sitting room —”

“It’s fine,” said Cal, taking both key cards with the easy smile that ended every negotiation he’d ever been in. “Thank you. We’ll manage.” And he picked up her case as well as his own, the picture of a considerate husband, and walked toward the lift, and Rachel had the choice of following him or making a scene in a marble lobby in front of a fully booked hotel, and she followed him, and the lift doors closed, and she rounded on him.

“One room.”

“One room,” he agreed.

“You did that on purpose.”

“It’s possible I made a mistake,” he conceded, watching the floors climb. He looked at her, and the charm dropped a notch into the lower register. “You can go back down and insist, if you like. Make the tired woman find you something. Sleep alone. I won’t mind.” A beat. “Will you?”

And there it was, laid out as neatly as everything he ever laid out: the door held open, the choice handed to her, the knowledge that whatever she did next she’d have done herself. She thought two nights in a foreign city in a bed that smelled of him.

“This isn’t a mini-break,” she said, which was not no, and they both heard that it wasn’t.

“Course not,” said Cal. “It’s a business trip.” And the lift doors opened on a corridor of warm light, and she followed him to the room, resolution all but forgotten.