Page 97 of The One Day You Were My Husband
“Eight years,” I whisper. I’m inside the lobby of my building now. Slowly, carefully, I go over to the mobility chair that lives by the lift, and I sit down on the ergonomic seat. I grip the handle with one hand, my phone with the other, and I’m back in that film again. The one where a normal woman finds herself in a crazy plot, disaster all around her. This cannot be my life. This man Johan’s describing cannot be the father of my children.
I grip the chair. I think I might faint.
“It’s him,” Johan says, gently, into my ear. “Once I put your names together I found several more pictures of you two. There’s no mistake. I’m sorry.”
“No,” I whisper.
“Look, you said he’s gone missing. What did you mean?”
“I mean…he’s not answered my calls or messages. I told him Dad had died and he hasn’t said a single word. He’s canceling my calls. My Roof guests tell me the house is deserted…He told them he had to go away last minute for some astronomical event. But there was a storm in the UK last night. The sky wouldn’t have been visible to anyone.”
“And…?”
My voice trembles. “He read our messages on Roof. I think that’s why he’s gone. He knows we’re in touch. He knows it’s you. He knows we were together last night.”
Johan says the Swedish swear word again. Then—“Well…I’m not surprised he’s panicking. He’ll know it’s only a matter of time before I work out who he is. Hang on—busy intersection…”
I sit, frozen, until Johan speaks again. “Did you speak to him last night? Did he seem odd?”
I think back to our calls yesterday and it was all there, of course. I just wasn’t looking. “Yes. He was odd. We spoke at lunchtime yesterday when I was driving—he was strangely clingy. Kept saying he really missed me. But then later on when I video called at the kids’ teatime, he was weird. Distant to the point of seeming angry. I just assumed he was fed up with the children, but I think he’d actually just found out we were meeting.”
Johan’s voice is firm. “Your kids are going to be fine. You’ve been with this man eight years. He’s their dad! And while I cannot understand what he was up to, getting together with you, I do know that if he was some sort of psychopath you’d have known by now.”
Would I? The man who held me through my pregnancy, through the twins’ hospitalization. The man with whom I shared my deepest fears as we lay in the dark at night, the man who has made me hundreds of pancakes, lasagnas, shepherd’s pies—his love of comfort food, planetary systems and constellations, his amiable bumbling around with retired astronomy nerds, his years of work to funnel rich peoples’ money into deserving causes. Who is he? Did he deliberately track me down? What was he after?
“It will be OK,” Johan repeats.
“But where is he? Where’s he taken the kids?”
“I don’t know. But I’ll help you find them. I don’t believe something terrible is going to happen, Carrie. I just don’t think he was ever that sort, and I don’t think you do either.”
“Then why are you coming to England? Why are you getting on the first plane to come and help me if you don’t believe anything bad is happening?”
He goes silent.
“I just don’t like any of this,” is what he says eventually, and I can hear the anxiety in his voice now. It sends terror through my body.
Thirty-five.
We sit in front of a floor-to-ceiling window looking across at the runway, waiting for our boarding call. In front of us sit two rye baguettes with smoked fish and sliced pickles. Lettuce frills out cheerily above a napkin covered in smiling faces. I don’t think either of us are likely to eat.
I listen silently to what Johan is saying, but my mind fights every word. Like everything else that has happened to us, this feels more like a hallucination than my life.
When Johan met Robin, Robin was halfway through a twelve-month contract advising a Swiss billionaire, Valentin Meyer, who lived in Singapore. Robin’s job then, as it is now in his freelance work, was to help this wealthy man disperse a small proportion of his staggering wealth to visible causes.
Meyer’s reputation had suffered as a result of his cooperation with the various triads of a giant, pan-Asian drugs syndicate, and thirty-year-old Robin had unknowingly been hired as part of a reputation management scheme. He was to help Meyer send very large amounts ofmoney to very good causes—or at least the ones willing to accept that sort of money—with maximum publicity.
He’d been based in Yangon because Meyer’s biggest giving project was in Myanmar. The relaxed hours had apparently allowed Robin to take on fixer contracts at the same time, which Meyer had encouraged. As Johan points out, it made sense. Robin was Meyer’s most visible contractor; it stood in Meyer’s favor to have Robin working hand in hand with aid agencies and journalists. And Robin has always liked to stay busy.
He had been anxious and unhappy when he’d met Johan. He told Johan, one evening over a beer, that he’d now been in the job long enough to realize that Meyer wasn’t the force for good he’d been sold. He was thinking of quitting, even though the money was sensational; his real fear was how his boss would react.
“I felt for him,” Johan says, smiling briefly. “He didn’t fill me in on any of the details but I could see it was really eating him. I didn’t think he’d be my scene. Posh British boy. But he was a really decent guy—very helpful, friendly, funny.”
That sounds like Robin. But what do I know?
“When he asked me if I could carry this medication for his boss’s friend, I said yes. I didn’t think about it. He’d done so much to help us by that point, I was glad of the chance to do something in return.”
He sighs, picking up his baguette, finally. Without any enthusiasm he takes a bite. “I’ve thought about tracking Robin down, over the years. Trying to ask him if he suffered any guilt, stitched me up like that, threatening to make it worse if I couldn’t get rid of your mum and Prawat. I couldn’t face him in the end, though.”
