The Fallout
Authors: Tamar Cohen
When close friends split, take care whose side you're on...
Dan and Sasha are Josh and Hannah's closest friends, and lately they all seem to spend more time with each other than they do apart. But cozy weekends together quickly dissolve into a bitter game of tug-of-war when Dan utters three treacherous little words:
I'm leaving her.
Dan fully expects Josh to defend his choicesâand that includes welcoming the sexy young model he's suddenly dating. Meanwhile, Dan's soon-to-be-ex-wife Sasha is devastatedâdangerously soâby his betrayal, and she leans heavily on Hannah for support. Though Josh and Hannah try desperately to avoid the fallout of their friends' battle, they're quickly engulfed by the poisonous fog of attack lawyers, ugly accusations and untimely revelations. Soon they're suffocating in Dan and Sasha's secrets...and their own.
Darkly witty and utterly chilling,
The Fallout
exposes the volatile nature of divorceâand the new lovers, obsessions and broken relationships that are left in its wake.
Praise for the novels of Tamar Cohen
“[H]onest and poignant storytelling. [Cohen] expresses the intricacies and emotions of the hearts of both Selina and Lottie, two distinctively different women who have been affected by the same circumstance, with deft expertise. A well-crafted plot, good, steady pacing and genuinely unique characters make this story an amusing, yet heartfelt read.”
â
RT Book Reviews
on
War of the Wives
“Cohen has a talent for capturing the nuances of human emotion, and her expression of the different forms of grieving is realistic and engaging.”
â
Booklist
on
War of the Wives
“Witty, ludicrously melodramatic and psychologically perceptive.”
â
Sunday Telegraph
on
War of the Wives
“A smart, gripping story that we just couldn't stop readingâyou won't believe the ending.”
â
Closer
magazine on
War of the Wives
“A cracking debutâ¦.
Fatal Attraction
with a clever twist at the end. Addictive.”
â
The Bookseller
on
The Mistress's Revenge
“Dark, clever and utterly addictive.”
âLisa Jewell, author of
Before I Met You
, on
The Mistress's Revenge
“Dark, compelling and breathtaking, and I read it in a single sitting.”
âJenny Colgan, author of
Resistance is Futile
, on
The Mistress's Revenge
Also by Tamar Cohen
War of the Wives
Once again to my amazing mum: Dr. Elizabeth Gaynor Cohen
Lucie, age four
I am scrunched up as small as small can be in my special place. My knees are right under my chin so that when I put out my tongue I can lick the scab on my right knee from where I fell off the swing in the playground. Scabs help you get better. You mustn't pick them. My heart is boom-booming in my chest and I have that sick feeling like when I needed to go to the toilet at school but didn't want to say and ended up in a warm puddle with my face hot and everyone laughing. It's not comfy sitting like this in my special place. My legs are hurting. Now I'm a big girl, nearly at big school, I don't really fit in my special place anymore, but I dare not move. I must stay as still as a statue. It's dark in my special place and I'm frightened but I mustn't make a sound. I must be as quiet as a little mouse. Eek, eek, eek.
Or Mummy will find me.
Chapter 1
“I'm leaving her.”
Josh gave no response. He was fiddling with his mobile phone, trying to get it to stop autocorrecting a text he was composing to Hannah, so he wasn't really listening. He checked his texts assiduously these days before pressing Send, ever since coming back from a weekend at his parents' and mistakenly informing his mother he was homosexual instead of home. The truth was he hated texting, and was probably the only person he knew who still laboriously typed
you
instead of the ubiquitous
u
. And as for apostrophesâdon't get him started.
“Sorryâleaving where?” Josh asked distractedly, still worrying away at the keyboard, his broad fingers as unwieldy as sausages.
“I said I'm leaving Sash. Look, would it kill you to pay a bit of attention?”
Josh heard something hiding in Dan's voice. A whine tucked away like a polyp under the surface of his normally cocky, overegged Essex twang. He looked up from his phone.
“You're joking, right? This is a joke.”
“Do I look like I'm fucking joking?”
He didn't. In truth, his expression was strained and a little horrified.
“You can't.” It was a feeble thing to say, but Josh was too shocked to think of anything else. Dan and Sasha had been together for years. Eight or nine, at least. Nearly as long as him and Hannah. And then there was September. She was still only four.
“What about the kitchen extension?”
Dan and Sasha had only just finished moving the kitchen up to the top level of their art deco house so that they could take advantage of those views out across the cricket and tennis clubs toward Alexandra Palace, spread out along the top of the distant hill. Josh and Hannah had been at the inaugural dinner party to celebrate the end of all the months of dust and builders just a couple of weeks before, and he and Dan had ended up doing tequila slammers on the new concrete worktops.
“Sod the fucking kitchen extension. That was Sasha's idea anyway. I was quite happy with the old one.”
“But...why?”
Dan put down his pint and fixed Josh with his wide-set blue eyesâthe ones Hannah had once declared, in a drunken moment, to be “far too sexy for a man,” which Josh had tried hard not to mind.
“We're just not good together anymore,” Dan said, shaking his head. “Don't get me wrong, Sasha is brilliant. I love her to bits. I'm just not in love with her.”
He kept his eyes trained on Josh's while the clichés spilled out of him, as if intensity was proof of sincerity. But Josh, who had accompanied Dan on two stag weekends as well as countless guys' nights out, had seen him give this look too many times in too many less-than-sincere circumstances for it to be truly effective. He sat back in his uncomfortable wooden chair with the saggy leather cushion, in the pub they always insisted on going to on game days, purely because it was so unappealing that they were always guaranteed a seat. Suddenly his head was abuzz with adrenaline.
“You've met someone else.”
Dan's eyes widened in surprise, his raised eyebrows disappearing into his floppy dishwater-blond hair.
“What are you talking about? Look, mate, I know it's a shock but sometimes people just grow apart. It doesn't mean there's someone else.”
“Cut the crap.” Josh wasn't angryâmostly because he still didn't believe Dan was remotely serious. But neither was he about to let him get away with feeding him some women's-magazine bullshit. “You wouldn't leave Sasha and September unless there was someone else waiting in the wings. I know you.
Mate
. You're emotionally lazy.”
“Emotionally lazy?” Dan bristled as if gearing up to protest, but then seemed to think better of it and slumped back down again. “Okay, you're right. I have met someone.” He glanced over at Josh, as if checking how this had gone down. “But we haven't done anything. What I mean is we haven't slept together.”
Josh knew he was lying.
“So who is she?”
His friend's eyes brightened, and he almost fell over his words in his delight at being given license to speak of this new beloved.
“Oh, mate, she's incredible. Amazing. Honestly, you have no idea. I met her on a shoot. Don't look at me like thatâyeah, she's a model. But she's not like all the rest. She's smart and funny and down-to-earth.”
“Andâdon't tell meâ
gorgeous
.” Josh traced exaggerated quotation marks in the air with his fingers to show he was being sardonic. But such subtleties were lost on Dan.
“No. She looks like the back end of a bus.” He grinned.
Josh struggled then to hide the wave of blind fury that swept over him out of nowhere. Anger was appropriate, wasn't it, in view of his friendship with Sasha? He refused to acknowledge, even to himself, that the anger might be overlaid with something else. Something acidic and powerful. It wasn't jealousy. Most assuredly not. Why should he feel jealous of Dan when he was about to lob a live grenade into the heart of his family? “Listen, Dan,” he said as he put on the voice he used when he was talking to his teenaged pupilsâreasonable, calm, but firm. “Everyone needs an ego boost from time to time. What are youâthirty-five? Thirty-six?”
“Oi, steady on! Just because you're staring forty in the face doesn't mean the rest of us are fucking ancient, as well. I'm thirty-four.”
“Whatever.” Josh was only thirty-eight. It was hardly ancient. He was fairly sure he was younger than Robbie Williams, for instance. “Listen, Dan, most blokes our ageâ” he enjoyed Dan's momentary scowl “âwho've been with the same woman for a long time get itchy feet. Do you think I've never thought about how it would be to be with someone other than Hannah?” Briefly he wondered whether that was exactly true.
Had
he ever seriously considered being with someone else? “But the thing is, I know it wouldn't be worth it. I'd be jeopardizing everything important to me for what? For a brief thrill?”
Dan had started shaking his head when Josh was still only halfway through this speech.
“Look, I loved Sasha, that's why I married her. But she's never been laid-back, not like Hannah. She is totally neurotic, you know that. Understandable given what happened to her as a child, but fucking wearying to live with. Stuff goes on at home that you wouldn't believe. She's always testing meâdo you know what I mean? She'll say something really hurtful just to try to get me to lose my temper, and then it's all, âSee, you can never trust anyone. All the people in my life who were supposed to care about me let me down.' Last week, we're having a drink at our neighbor's house and suddenly Sasha gets up, announces she has a headache and leaves, telling me to stay and she'll be fine. Then when I get home she launches into me for not going with her to make sure she's okay. It's exhausting!”
Dan's tone had taken on a shrill, self-justifying note. He looked up and caught Josh's raised eyebrow.
“Okay, you're right,” he said in a strange, strangled voice suddenly quite unlike his own. “I don't want to hurt Sasha. But what can I say, man? I've fallen in love. I realize now I was never really
in love
with Sasha. I wanted to look after her, but with Sienna I've found an equal. Someone who can be a real life partner. I feel alive!”
“Sienna?”
Dan shrugged.
“That's her name. You can't blame her for that.”
Josh's face assumed an “are you fucking kidding me?” expression. Of course. She would have to be called something like Sienna. Dan couldn't possibly have fallen for someone named Cathy or Melanie or Ruth.
“And how old exactly is
Sienna
?”
His voice came out more sneering than he'd intended.
Dan pushed himself back from the table, dislodging the folded-up cardboard coaster that had been wedged under one of the legs to stop it from wobbling, and glanced around the pub. His pretty-boy face would no doubt lose its cherubic quality by fifty, but for now it remained guileless, betraying every emotion just as surely as if he had subtitles running across his forehead.
Josh was quietly satisfied now to recognize embarrassment in his friend's expression (not surprising), and shame (well, good). But there was something else also, something Dan was trying very hard to hide. Triumph. That was it. On some level, Dan was
pleased
with himself.
“Don't laugh, okay, but she's twenty-four.”
“
Twenty-four!
For fuck's sake, you're a walking, talking cliché.”
“I know it looks that way. But she's really mature for her age. She has an old soul.”
“Right. And next you'll be telling me you were lovers in a past life?”
Dan allowed himself a quick smirk before his face crumpled again, the even, pleasant features folding in on themselves like dough.
“Oh, God. I feel awful about what's happening. How am I going to tell Sash? And September?”
For a second Josh almost felt sorry for him. He couldn't imagine turning his back on his wife and child, packing up his things and moving out of his family home. The thought of it made him feel physically sick. Not waking up with Hannah's long, thick red hair tickling his face, or Lily's little hand on his arm, shaking him awake.
Come on Daddy, you big old sleepyhead poopoohead.
Not taking Toby the dachshund around the block before work, his breath coming out cloudy in the cold air, crossing paths with Janey from two doors down with her dribbling chocolate Labrador. Now there was a proper dog. Josh had been mortified when Hannah had first brought Toby home, a sausage on legs, a furry worm, all floppy ears and big mournful eyes. Now, predictably, he doted on him, more even than Hannah and Lily did. Just because something started as a compromise didn't mean you couldn't end up loving it just the same.
He still couldn't believe Dan could be serious about leaving it all behindâthe familiar hot water bottle of domesticity. Sure, he and Sasha bickered a lot, but it didn't mean anything. The next minute they'd be all over each other, often nauseatingly so. It wasn't perfect but they were happy. Surely? They were all happy.
For the first time, Josh started to think about what this could potentially mean for him and Hannah. Dan and Sasha Fisher had been their best friends since they'd met when the girls were newborns. They socialized together, they helped each other out with babysitting. Dan and Josh had their Saturday football, Hannah and Sasha went to art galleries or to their Thursday evening book club (which seemed to him to be largely an excuse to drink wine and complain about their husbands). The little girls were inseparable.
“We can still hang out together,” Dan said, as if he'd read Josh's mind. “You'll love Sienna when you get to know her.”
“Dream on, mate.”
“What?”
“If you think you can just slot another woman into Sasha's place and we'll all be like an episode of bloody
Friends
, you're living in cloud cuckoo land. Hannah would never stand for it. She's really loyal that way.”
“I know it wouldn't happen immediately. But in time, that's all I meant. And don't worry, I'm going to give Sasha whatever she asks for. I don't want her or September to want for anything. I give you my word this is going to be the most civilized divorce in history.”
Josh gaped at him.
“So, let's just recap. You're leaving your wife of what? Eight years? For a woman a decade younger. And you think she's going to be happy to sit down over a nice cup of tea and make arrangements about dividing up her home, her
daughter
, for God's sake. You're fucking deluded.”
Dan colored, his skin taking on a purplish hue.
“I'm not leaving her for Sienna. I told you, Sasha and I haven't been right for ages. We've never really been right. Living with her is like being on eggshells 24/7. I haven't been happy in years.” The timeworn phrases dripped from his tongue like cake batter off a spoon.
“And let me guessâyou deserve to be happy.”
“Sure. Everyone does, don't they?”
Josh shook his head.
“I'm not going to get caught up in some existential debate about the nature of happiness.” He was properly angry now. “I just don't think you can build your happiness on the back of someone else's misery.” Now who was talking in clichés?
Dan looked miserable, yet defiant. Josh recognized that look from his students.
“I know Sasha will be in pieces at first. Of course she will. But I really believe in the long run she'll realize it's the best thing for her. This way she's free to find someone who really appreciates her.”
Josh sighed. Now that it was sinking in that Dan actually was serious, he was feeling faintly ill. Until Dan, he'd never really had close friends, not since school anyway. He was the type of person who got included as part of group outings but not in intimate gatherings. And once he'd met Hannah, she was all the friend he'd needed. So he'd been pleasedâgrateful, evenâto find himself accepted so readily into Dan's inner circle. And he was fond of Sasha, too, although she could be prickly sometimes.
“When are you going to tell her?”
“Tonight. That's why it's really important you don't tell Hannah anything until I've had a chance to talk to Sash properly. I know you two can't shit without giving each other a full description, but you've got to promise me not to say anything. I don't want Sasha to hear about this from anyone apart from me.”
Dan's face wore a noble expression and Josh had an uncharacteristic impulse to punch it.
“Oh, and whatever you do, don't mention Sienna. I'm not going to tell Sasha about her until she's used to the idea of us splitting up. It would confuse the issue.”
“What's there to be confused about? You're leaving her for another woman. Oldest story in the book.”