The Secret Life of Evie Hamilton - Catherine Alliott [61]
‘It's my car, actually, so mind your own business, OK?’
He shook his head in naked disbelief. Mimicking him, I shook mine back, adopting a gormless expression and wishing I was the sort of person who could flick two fingers. Instead, I childishly stuck my tongue out as far as it could go, which made my head wobble. Then I faced front and shot off, kangarooing elegantly out of my space and into the traffic, narrowly missing a car coming up behind me.
Bloody man, I seethed as a horn blared angrily in my wake. All I needed. Yes, and you can sod off too. I scowled as my new aggressor swept past, glowering. Bloody men. Bloody male drivers, actually. Raking a harassed hand through my hair, I glanced in the mirror to check the first one was out of sight. Yes. Good. I took a deep, shaky breath, and as I did, he and his poxy car shuffled right down my deck of worry cards and instead, my débâcle with Ant shuffled effortlessly to the top, the trump card flipping over in all its lurid glory.
‘Oooh…’ I shrank down in my seat and exhaled at the wheel. This was all getting far too horrible. Far too horrible. He'd felt trapped. Felt he had to marry me. Felt he'd owed it to me – he'd as good as said so – and all the time, all the time he'd been in love with someone else. Someone younger, clever, beautiful… I gulped down the bile. Someone, who perhaps he'd have pursued, married even, if it hadn't been for Neville. I filtered in another shaky breath through my teeth.
A few spots of rain splattered the windscreen. I gazed numbly through them into the traffic on the Woodstock Road. No. No, you're wrong, Evie. You're overstating this, overreacting. There's nothing to say he would have even gone out with her, or, if he had, that he wouldn't have come back to you; married you. And anyway, it was all over seventeen years ago. Get a grip, woman! Move on. It's history. Except… it wasn't. Would never be history, not when there was a child. Living proof. I gripped the wheel. This would never go away, never. They'd always be with me, this… this – Isabella – I almost retched – and her daughter, Stacey, and somehow I felt it was my fault. That God was punishing me for forcing Ant's hand, for manipulating him, for letting him know I expected a wedding ring at the end of a decent period of courtship, and, at twenty-six years old, why not? I glanced nervously up at the sky, almost expecting the clouds to part, for God's finger to point, his voice to boom out, ‘What goes around comes around, Evie!’ No. No, God wouldn't say that. But it was definitely all my fault.
I was heading, I realized, out of the city and towards the Ring Road, which meant I'd be taking the Daglington road to the lanes. I was instinctively going home, to the farm, which, even after all these years, I knew I still regarded as such. When we were first married I'd say to Ant, shall we go home this weekend? And he'd laugh and say, we are home! When we were first married… My mind scuttled frantically back. Were we happy? Yes. Very. I knew, in all honesty, that was true. So get over this, Evie. It's a blip, that's all. A seventeen year blip, not even one of his making, not even a male mid-life crisis.
On an impulse, I swung the car all the way around the next roundabout and headed back into town. I couldn't go