Extra Time (36 page)

But being with Ronnie, having spent the time she had with him – especially tonight – it had brought her a strange feeling of calm, and a moment of clarity she wasn’t sure she’d felt in a long time. The only man she should ever be this close to was Jim. Her husband. It was time to stop escaping and head back to a reality she may not feel much like facing, but it was
her
reality. Whether she liked it or not.

Chapter Eighteen

Jim paced the floor, looking up at the clock on the living room wall for what felt like the millionth time, Ryan’s words still playing on his mind –
‘…you need to be looking closer to home on that score.’

It didn’t take a genius to work out what he meant by that. But was he really telling Jim something he ought to be taking notice of? Or was he just trying to cause a diversion so that his own behaviour could be overlooked? Whatever the reason, it involved Amber. It involved his wife, the woman he loved more than he could even begin to explain. And if something
was
going on, then
he
was the one who’d handed her every excuse she’d needed. Who else could he blame?

He stopped pacing the second he heard the front door close, staying rooted to the spot, waiting until she walked into the room.

‘Where’ve you been?’ he asked, wondering if she was going to tell him the truth –whatever that truth was, because he didn’t really know – or whether she was just going to spin him some excuse. Would he even know which answer it was she gave him? ‘It’s late.’

‘I’ve been at Ronnie’s,’ Amber replied, throwing her bag down on the sofa by the door. ‘I needed to get away from you, Jim. Just for a couple of hours, to get my head straight.’ She looked at him, right into his eyes, and it was at that second that he knew. He could tell. She’d been with another man. It was written all over her face – the guilt, the anxiety, it was all there. Almost as if she couldn’t be bothered to hide it. Like she wanted him to find out.

‘Is it straight now?’ He continued to watch her as she moved around the room, sliding off a black scarf she’d had tied round her neck, letting it waft slowly to the floor as she shrugged off her jacket.

She said nothing, just nodded as she walked over to the sideboard to fix herself a drink.

‘When did you get divorced?’ She finally broke the brief silence that had ensued, taking a sip of brandy as she slowly turned back around to face him.

‘Two years after we married.’

‘Was it ever serious?’ She took another sip, shuddering slightly as the dark liquid slipped down her throat.

He shook his head. ‘No. No, it was never serious. It was never anything, Amber.’

‘So why did you marry her? Because she was pregnant? If that was the case, then why not follow through and help her bring up the baby?’

‘We were never a couple, Amber. I’ve tried to tell you all of this…’

‘I don’t understand any of it, Jim.’

His eyes locked with hers. ‘Is that why you’ve been sleeping with Ronnie?’

Amber felt her stomach give a dip so harsh she felt physically sick. Had he known all along? Had he always suspected? Was this his way of trying to trick her into some kind of confession?

‘Did I push you that far away, Amber?’ His voice was quiet, no anger evident at all, which only served to confuse her even more. ‘Was it my fault?’

She closed her eyes for a second, taking a deep breath before opening them and facing him. ‘It’s all such a mess, Jim. Everything. And I don’t even know how we got to this, how it became so fucked up and complicated. I don’t know.’

‘She was a prostitute.’

Amber blinked a couple of times to make sure she was actually awake and this wasn’t just some crazy, disjointed dream she was having. What was he talking about?
Who
was a prostitute?

‘Brandon’s mom. Well, she was a prostitute at the time I met her, anyway.’

She couldn’t help but stare at him, trying to take in exactly what he was telling her. How had they got from the subject of her sleeping with Ronnie to him telling her his ex-wife was a prostitute? How? What messed-up route were they on here?

‘I… Jim, I… Does Brandon know?’

‘Of course he doesn’t know,’ Jim said, pushing a hand through his hair as he sat down on the arm of the sofa. ‘And he never
will
know. That was the whole point of me marrying Heather – his mom. To give Brandon a better life than the one he could have ended up with.’

Amber poured herself another drink – one she very much needed now. ‘Do you want one?’ she asked, looking over at Jim as a multitude of mixed feelings washed over her at a pace so rapid she felt dizzy.

He nodded, grateful that everything was finally coming out in the open. All the years of pretending hadn’t been easy. Or necessary. It wasn’t as if the world needed to know every detail about his past, but Amber should have known everything. He knew that now. Would it have prevented this whole mess from happening? He couldn’t answer that. He didn’t even know if getting past everything that had gone on was an option anymore, all he knew was that it all had to come out. Or most if it, anyway. And then the truth of what Amber had done had to be faced.

‘Me and you, we weren’t together when I met her,’ Jim began, taking the drink Amber held out for him. ‘We’d just split up and I was with…’ He looked down at the floor, closing his eyes as he took a quick sip of brandy. ‘Well, you know who I was with at the time.’

Amber leaned back against the wall. She didn’t want to sit down. She didn’t want to get comfortable. ‘Where did you meet her?’

‘The Goldman Hotel.’

Amber threw her head back, sighing quietly. ‘Jesus Christ, Jim…’

‘I know. I know I was stupid, and I know it could have ended up a whole lot worse…’

She stared at him, arching an eyebrow. ‘Oh, you think so?’

He closed his eyes again. This was harder than he’d ever thought it could be, because Amber had almost certainly erected those barriers around herself again – to protect him from her, as well as the other way around? And if that was the case, could they ever really get back to where they’d once been? To a time when they’d been happy. But that had been a time when the lies and the secrets and the painful inevitabilities of their marriage had still existed, so was what was happening here a situation they were never really going to be able to avoid? Was it always going to have happened, no matter what? He took another drink, draining his glass. ‘It really was just one night, Amber. That was the one and only time we ever slept together, I…’ He looked at her. He was going to say
‘I promise you’
, but knowing the way she felt about him saying those words, he thought better of it.

‘You married her,’ Amber pointed out, walking over to him and retrieving his empty glass, giving him a refill without asking if he wanted one.

Jim took a deep breath before speaking again. ‘It was about – I dunno – about three months later, maybe more, when she contacted me again, when she told me she was pregnant. And given her line of work I wasn’t convinced, you know? I wasn’t convinced the baby was mine.’

‘Understandable,’ Amber said, resuming her position by the fireplace.

‘But she was insistent. She said I was the only guy she’d slept with who hadn’t used any protection…’

Amber looked down at the floor, not sure she really wanted to hear anymore, but at the same time she knew she had to.

‘I’d been careless, reckless. I had to take responsibility.’

‘So you married her? Just like that?’

‘She was… she was a student. Studying law. She’d been in her final year at university and… and even though she’d only done what she’d done to make some extra money, she… it was never gonna be a way of life for her. She’d made mistakes – and we all do that, don’t we?’

His eyes locked onto hers and Amber felt a shiver run right through her. But she said nothing, just let him continue.

‘I couldn’t know for definite that it was my baby, not until it was born but… I trusted her.’

‘You trusted a prostitute? Who worked The Goldman?’

He looked at her again, his eyes almost begging her to believe him. But getting her to believe anything he said wasn’t an easy thing to do anymore. If it ever had been. ‘I trusted her, Amber. And that’s when I realised – if that baby
was
mine then I didn’t want him being brought up in a life where his mom had to struggle to survive, where he couldn’t have the simplest of things. I wanted him to have a safe life. To have a roof over his head and food on the table.’

‘And you thought marrying her was the way to go about all of that, did you?’

He looked down into his drink. ‘She graduated just a couple of months before Brandon was born. She wanted to be a lawyer…’

‘We all want a lot of things we can’t have, Jim.’

His eyes met hers again, a silent, almost painful message passing between them. ‘I just wanted my baby to be happy and settled, Amber. That’s all. And it was something I could afford to do.’

‘So, you thought it would all work out much better for you if she was out of the country, am I on the right track here?’

He hung his head, because that was the truth, in reality. He couldn’t deny that. It was the truth. And the beginning of decades of secrets and lies. ‘If it had all come out, yes, it could have damaged my career, maybe, possibly. I can’t… I can’t lie.’

Amber almost flinched at the irony of those last few words.

‘There were opportunities for her over in the States,’ Jim went on, taking a small sip of his second drink.

‘Is that what your agent told you?’

He looked up at her. ‘You don’t flinch from asking the hard questions, do you?’

‘It’s my job.’

He turned his head away for a second, trying to compose himself, because he knew this could turn out to be one long night. ‘We got married in Brooklyn. A very quiet, very quick ceremony – just us, my agent, and my manager. All very hush-hush. The way it had to be…’ He trailed off for a second, taking another sip of brandy. ‘I set her up in a nice, comfortable house in a quiet neighbourhood, somewhere perfect for bringing up kids… Brandon was born just days after the wedding.’

‘Were you there? At Brandon’s birth?’ Just asking that question almost broke Amber’s heart, because the thought of him being there, being a part of something he could never be a part of with her, it hurt like nothing had ever hurt before.

He shook his head, and a selfish wave of relief flooded Amber’s body. ‘She didn’t want me there. We meant nothing to each other, Amber, and that’s the truth. Everything I did, I did it for Brandon. I did it for him. But I… I did see him, not long after he was born.’

Amber closed her eyes, every crazy, mixed-up emotion, every messed-up, painful feeling she’d gone through in the past few weeks all colliding inside her like the most insensitive party ever thrown, taunting her until she found it hard to keep the tears at bay.

‘By the time I had to go back to the U.K. Heather had a place at law school lined up, childcare was sorted, and a DNA test had proved Brandon was mine. But I guess you only have to look at him now to know that.’

Amber said nothing, but he was right, Brandon had so much of Jim in him it was ridiculous.

‘I only married her to make sure she could stay in the U.S., Amber. To make sure my name was on that birth certificate, to make sure my son was going to be okay. No other reason. And you can stand there and tell me you don’t want me to say these words, but I promise you that. I promise you. We divorced as soon as was legally possible, and I guess I was lucky, in reality. Heather never placed any unnecessary demands on me, she understood the way things worked. She still does. She let me get on with my life, and I let her get on with hers. All I ever asked for was the chance to visit my son whenever I could.’

Amber looked down into her almost-empty glass of brandy. ‘I’m assuming she never went back to…’

‘No. She’s worked as a lawyer for years now. And she’s a good one. She met her husband just days after joining the firm she’s worked for since she left Law School. They’ve been happily married ever since. Both of them have been made partners now, so, all in all, it’s worked out for the best.’

Amber looked up at him. ‘Really?’

His eyes stayed locked on hers. ‘Maybe everything could have been handled a lot better, Amber, but in the long run nobody got hurt.’

‘Nobody got hurt…’ she repeated, finishing the last of her brandy before walking over to the sideboard, placing the empty glass down on it, her hand hovering over the bottle as she contemplated a third drink. ‘Is that how you really see it, Jim?’ She decided against the drink and turned back round to face him. ‘Nobody got hurt?’

‘Heather got a new life over there in the U.S., a life she loved – still loves. Brandon was well looked after, and I tried to visit him as much as I could, but…’

‘Nobody got hurt.’

He walked over to her, his eyes on hers all the time, never breaking the stare. ‘How could I know it would all end up like this?’

‘You could have tried being honest from the start, Jim. That could have changed everything.’

‘Would it have changed the fact you slept with your best friend?’

She kept her eyes on his, knowing that to break the stare would make her look weak, and yes, she felt guilty, but she wasn’t alone in being in the wrong here. ‘I slept with Ronnie to escape the shit that was going on around me, Jim. And I know that sounds like the most pathetic, over-used excuse, but it’s the truth. There
is
no excuse for what I did, and I’m sorry, I truly am, because I shouldn’t have acted so childishly. It was a rash and stupid decision, in hindsight, but do you not see what you do to me? How you push me away? With the lies and the secrets and the fact I just don’t know if I can trust you anymore. Can you not see that?’

‘You slept with another man, Amber. We’re married, and you slept with another man. So if we’re playing the blame game here, how can I ever trust
you
again, knowing what you’ve done?’

She stared at him, narrowing her eyes slightly. ‘Then walk away.’ She hadn’t even realised the words had slipped out, that she’d said them out loud, but there they were, hanging in the air like some dark, unwanted storm cloud.