Sunday, 21 July

Alix cannot sleep. It is nearly 3 a.m. and she lies wide awake, on her back, staring up at the ceiling. The air is hot and sticky, and an electric fan rustles the pages of the paperback book on the bedside table. She is simultaneously shocked and entirely unsurprised that she has been let down by Nathan. And she is humiliated that she had thought that an offer of sex might have been enough to tempt him home by midnight when, it now seems, he does not need to come home to find someone who wants to have sex with him.

In her mind she replays all the times he has expressed his disappointment in men who cheat. His friends are all ‘good guys’, he says, guys who would never do that. He has said he couldn’t comfortably be friends with men who treated their wives like that. But yet … Daisy; cocaine; room number 23.

She’d messaged Giovanni at about 1 a.m., who claimed they left Nathan at a bar in Soho just before midnight.

Alone? she asked.

As far as I know , he replied, and she knew he was lying.

She wishes she was the sort of woman who kept a stash of sleeping pills in her bathroom cabinet, like in American TV shows. She wishes there was something she could do to switch her brain off. Eventually she gives up on bed and heads downstairs. The cat is happy to have an unexpected nocturnal visitor and Alix crouches down to stroke her. Through the glass roof of the kitchen extension, she sees a fat, orange moon overhead. She imagines the same orange moon hanging over Nathan, wherever he is, whatever he is doing, possibly glowing off the soft skin in the dip at the small of his back as he moves in and out of some faceless woman called Daisy in a boutique hotel room somewhere.

Alix wakes at five o’clock. The first thing she does is reach for her phone and check it for anything, absolutely anything that might suggest the possibility that her husband is coming home. But there is nothing. She rests her phone on her bedside table and lies back down. The sun is coming up and her curtains glow peachy red while the house creaks and sighs as it expands back to size. She feeds the cat and drinks a huge glass of water and a moment later she hears footsteps down the hallway and there is Petal.

The shock of her niece, fresh and tiny in a blue cotton nightdress, contrasted against the dark griminess of Alix’s thoughts all night, almost takes her breath away. ‘Good morning, sweetie,’ she says. ‘You’re up bright and early.’

‘I always like to get up early,’ she says. ‘I like it being just me.’

Alix nods at her and smiles and then offers her food to eat and juice to drink. She heaves open the back doors to let out the stale night air. She empties the dishwasher and glances at Petal, every now and then, as she slowly eats a bowl of Special K at the kitchen table. She doesn’t talk to her, leaves her to enjoy her early-morning solitude. She calls Nathan. She makes a coffee. Calls Nathan again. She has no idea, none whatsoever, what she should be doing.

Alix did not know it was possible for time to pass as slowly as it passes that day. She goes back to bed at 7 a.m. and sleeps for an hour or so, but is soon wide awake again, the morning sun burning through the curtains and across her body, her head full of needles of sharp anxiety and shards of fragmented thoughts. She forces herself to eat some toast and necks three espressos in a row, none of them touching the sides of her exhaustion. How long, she wonders, how long can she merely sit and wait?

At nine o’clock she feels it is polite to call Giovanni. He picks up immediately. ‘Gio,’ she says. ‘Nathan is still not home. Please, if there’s something you’re not telling me, tell me now!’

The thick, putrid silence on the other end of the line tells Alix all she needs to know. ‘No,’ he says stiffly. ‘No. We just left him in a bar. Like we always do. There was nothing.’

‘Well,’ Zoe says when Alix relays this back to her a moment later. ‘Bro code. He would say that, wouldn’t he?’

Alix sighs. She knows that Zoe is right.

‘What time does he normally get back after a bender?’ Zoe asks.

‘The afternoon?’

‘Well then, let’s not worry until the afternoon,’ says Zoe and Alix nods but then something occurs to her and she pulls out her phone and opens up her banking app. She and Nathan have a joint bank account. They always have done, ever since it became clear that Alix was never going to be a big earner and that Nathan already was. Nathan never looks at it. He never looks at bank statements or restaurant bills or keeps receipts. He spends money on the assumption that he is roughly balancing his outgoings with his income and, for the most part, he is correct.

She scrolls through the pending payments section of her online statement, looking for anything to explain where he might be, but there is nothing. Nothing since a payment to the bar in the West End that Giovanni said they’d left him in, of £25.60. No Uber payments. No hotel charges. Nothing. He has disappeared without a trace.

The afternoon arrives. Dark clouds appear overhead, and the temperature finally drops a degree or two. Zoe and Maxine have stayed longer than planned and there is a weird unsettledness in the air, as if they are in a waiting room expecting an announcement of some kind.

Alix spends an hour in her walk-in wardrobe ransacking the pockets of Nathan’s clothes, looking for more clues to his behaviour, but there’s nothing. Her sisters offer her food, but she can’t eat. She can’t think. She can barely breathe.

The dark clouds gather momentum and then, at just after four o’clock, the rumbling begins, and by four thirty the rain lashes down, the air fills with petrichor and the heat finally drops. They run around closing windows all over the house. Alix calls Giovanni again, but he doesn’t take her call. Her sisters tell her they have to leave in an hour, their children have homework to do, their cats need feeding, it’s a school night, and Alix realises that the moment her sisters leave, she will be trapped in the house, unable to leave without the children, and she quickly changes out of her summer dress and into leggings and trainers and walks as fast as she can towards Giovanni’s house, half a mile away. He’s lying; she knows he’s lying. She needs to see him face to face, to look into his eyes, look into his partner’s eyes, get the truth about what happened last night.

He looks shocked when he sees her at the door. He opens it a crack and then fully open with a sigh of surrender. ‘Still no sign of him?’ he asks meekly.

‘No. Still no sign. And, Gio, please, don’t treat me like an idiot. I know something happened last night. Look.’ She empties her pockets of the things she’d found in her shoe rack. ‘Look,’ she says again. ‘These are Nathan’s. I found them last night. He makes out he’s purer than pure, and then I find girls’ phone numbers scrawled on napkins, bags of cocaine. I mean, seriously, just be honest with me. Was there a girl involved last night? Just tell me!’

And then all the remaining puff goes out of Giovanni, and he invites her in and sits her at his kitchen table, which is covered with the debris of a family lunch, plates and dishes brought in from the sudden rain still with splashes of rainwater on their rims. She sees Giovanni and his partner exchange a look and then he turns to her and says, ‘There was a girl. But seriously, honestly, Alix, it wasn’t anything. And I swear, Nathan has never gone off with a girl before. I don’t know who that Daisy is on the napkin. Maybe someone who wanted a job or office space or something. We talk to randoms all the time when we go out. But he has never, ever gone off with someone. I swear. But last night this woman came and sat with us. Her name was Katelyn. Said she’d been stood up by her mate, was it OK if she hung out with us for a while. And she ended up staying and drinking with us and then we left the pub to go to the bar in Soho and she came with us. But I swear, Alix, there was nothing going on with them. Nathan kept talking about you. Kept saying he was married. How beautiful you were.’

Alix blinks slowly. She glances at her wedding ring and turns it once around her finger before looking up at Giovanni again. ‘And then what happened?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, you said you left Nathan in the bar at midnight. Did she leave too?’

Giovanni drops his gaze to the tabletop. He shakes his head slowly. But then he looks up at her quickly and says, ‘She was saying she was going to get him home. She was saying that Nathan told her he was on a promise and she was going to make sure he got home to … well, you know?’

Alix exhales heavily and lets her head roll backwards. ‘He told a complete stranger about our sex life?’

Giovanni nods again. ‘But, honestly, it was just fun. Just banter. She just seemed like one of the boys, you know. She didn’t seem like she was …’

‘Like she was what?’

‘I don’t know. Like she was going to lead him astray, I guess. It just felt like one of those nights, you know, when Nathan wasn’t going to stop. One of those nights when he was going to get lost to the night, and – honestly? I think we were glad he had someone with him, so that we could, you know, just go home.’

He glances up at her sheepishly. ‘I’m sure he’ll be home soon,’ he says. ‘You know what he’s like. He’s probably home right now. Just walked in through the door.’ He smiles at her, but she doesn’t return it.

‘What did she look like? This Katelyn?’

‘Pretty?’ he says, his voice racked with apology.

‘How old?’

‘Youngish? Maybe late twenties? Early thirties?’

She sighs and rolls her eyes. ‘I wish you’d told me this earlier,’ she says. ‘I wish you hadn’t lied.’

‘I’m sorry, Alix,’ he says, picking at a bit of paper with his fingernails. ‘I’m really sorry.’