Page 71 of The One Day You Were My Husband
The tourists who checked in are beginning to arrive back down in the bar now, free of their thick coats and suitcases. There’s a hum of conversation and laughter from the tables they’re pulling together.
I watch Johan trying to compose himself. He’s still in jeans and a jumper, but they’re of higher quality than the clothes he used to wear; he no longer looks like an aspiring diver with a sideline in translation and plastering. He looks like he can afford good therapy and regular massages. And while I accept that none of these things would heal several years in a Thai prison, the impression overall is of a man in excellent health. Strong, fit, robust and—perhaps more than ever before—unbearably attractive.
“You should have been told,” is what he says. “But—and I know this will make you even more angry—I’m not at liberty to say anymore about why I thought you knew, or what I expected to have happened when I was pardoned. I’m sorry.”
“What?No way! You can’t do this to me!”
“I’m sorry, Carrie. But it’s not just about me.”
Furious, disbelieving, I get up. I cannot be at this table a moment longer. But seconds later, I sit back down. I’m not losing him again. Not now.
He looks at me, silently, for a long time, and his eyes are still beautiful. I wish they weren’t. Bright denim blue, and watching me as if I’m the only person on earth.
“What I can tell you is that there was never another girlfriend.” He says this slowly, with the emphasis onnever. “And Ineverworked for a big crime ring. I did hear they were going to send that story out. To deter you, in case you decided to fly back to Thailand for another try,although I never believed it would actually reach you. But I guess they’re the sort of people who could pull off anything. I know it was them who tipped off your hospital trust about my arrest. They just wanted you and your mum out of there as quickly as possible.”
I wrap my arms around myself.
“Say that again.”
He looks straight at me. “I did not work for a crime ring. And I did not have a girlfriend. I loved you, Carrie.Onlyyou.”
He stops talking and just looks straight at me, as if waiting for me to take this in. “Only you,” he repeats, quietly. “But I made a monumental error of judgment that I nearly paid for with my life.”
I close my eyes, hugging myself harder. I want to believe him.
“So you mean, Prawat lied to me? About you working for a gang? He lied about the girlfriend?”
“Oh, no. He was simply sharing the information he’d been deliberately fed. He’d have had no reason to believe it wasn’t true.”
“So was there even a crime ring? Was that made up, too?”
Johan’s face changes. “The syndicate’s very real. I don’t know much about it but I do know it’s one of the biggest criminal organizations in the world. Certainly the biggest in Asia. But I can tell you I had absolutely nothing to do with it.”
“And the syndicate’s the reason you still won’t talk to me?”
He squirms. “Yes and no.”
He looks down at my hand on the table for a while and I know he’s looking at my wedding ring. “I was cleared,” he says. “Completely, and rightfully. I was not a drug dealer, Carrie, and I never worked for any criminal organizations. I didn’t have a double life. I was exactly the person you thought I was. And you—us—our wedding—everymoment of it was real.”
My eyes swim with tears. It feels like a betrayal to Robin, to my children, and especially to my old self, for me to be crying like this, but this is many years’ worth of grief and anger discharging, and I have neither the strength nor the desire to stop it.
Johan hands me the little napkin that came with his drink, and I dry my eyes. Outside, darkness is beginning to fall; car lights bleed into the compacted ice, and the cocktail bar across the way is switching on its fairy lights. As if in response, our own bar lowers its lighting and the round white globes on each table glow into life. It’s uncomfortably romantic.
I look at Johan, once the love of my life. He’s still watching me, with the intensity my body still remembers.
“I am so sorry.” He reaches over to hand me more tissues as another tear falls, but I pull away. I don’t want him touching me. Looking at me in that way.
“How am I meant to believe anything you say?” I ask again.
“I don’t know.” His voice is sad. “I just don’t know.”
I look away. As he says, I have no reason to trust him. But I know he’s telling the truth. I feel it. And that’s why I’m crying; that’s why the world feels changed. Even though it’s years too late, I’m finally hearing what I longed to hear. What I needed to hear, for the sake of my sanity. My heart.
—
He asks about my family. He wants to know about Mum, Maya, and Eagle, their life in Colorado. I’d forgotten how much he liked my mother, how admiring he had always been of not only her work but of her as a woman in her own right.
Dutifully, and because I’m in shock, I ask about his parents, aboutLucas, about life in Sweden. I ask the sort of questions one might ask an ex they haven’t seen in several years. But I’m lost. Everything I built on anger is collapsing around me.
