What Alice Forgot - Liane Moriarty [17]
A plain, innocuous, clean blue bath towel. Alice looked at it and felt nothing but embarrassment. She was fossicking through somebody else’s private stuff. Jane Turner had obviously picked up someone else’s bag and insisted it was hers without really looking at it. It was just like Jane. So bossy and impatient.
Well.
Alice examined her beautifully manicured fingernails again. She put her hand in the bag again and pulled out a plastic bag, folded flat. She opened it and emptied it onto her lap.
A woman’s clothes. Underwear. A red dress. A cream-colored cardigan with a single large wooden button. Knee-high beige boots. Small jewelry case.
The underwear was creamy lace-edged satin. Alice’s underwear tended to be flippant and faded; jolly seahorses on her pants and purple cotton bras that clipped at the front.
She held the dress up in front of her and saw that it was beautiful. A simple design of silky fabric with tiny cream flowers. The cream of the cardigan matched the cream of the flowers on the dress exactly.
She checked the label on the dress. An S for small. It wouldn’t fit her. She was a medium at best. It couldn’t be hers. She folded the clothes back up and opened the jewelry case, lifting out a fine gold necklace with a big topaz stone. The stone was too big for her taste, but she dangled it over the dress and agreed that it was an excellent match. Well done, whoever you are.
The other piece of jewelry was Alice’s gold Tiffany charm bracelet.
Alice said, “Fancy meeting you here.” She picked up the bracelet and laid it across her wrist and felt comforted, as if Nick had finally arrived.
Nick had bought this bracelet for her the day after they found out she was pregnant with the Sultana. He shouldn’t have spent that much because they were experiencing what Nick called “severe fiscal stress,” due to the fact that every single thing they did to the house ended up costing more than planned, but Nick said it could go on the balance sheet under “extraordinary items” (whatever that meant) because it was extraordinary that they were having a baby.
The Sultana had been conceived on a Wednesday night, which just didn’t seem exciting enough a night for such a momentous event, and the sex hadn’t even been that passionate or romantic. It was just that there had been nothing much on TV and Nick had yawned and said, “We should paint the hallway,” and Alice had said, “Oh, let’s just have sex,” and Nick had yawned again and said, “Mmmm. Okay.” And then they’d discovered there weren’t any condoms in the chest of drawers next to the bed, but by then the action was under way and neither of them could be bothered to get up and find one in the bathroom, and besides which it was a Wednesday and it was only once and, well, they were married. They were allowed to get pregnant, so therefore it wasn’t really likely. The next day Alice discovered there actually had been a condom in the back of the drawer if she’d bothered to stretch her fingers just a bit further but by then it was too late. The Sultana had already started doing what it needed to do to become a person.
The day after they did the eight positive pregnancy tests (just in case the first seven were wrong) Nick had come home from work and handed her a small gift-wrapped box with a card that said “For the mother of my child,” and inside was the bracelet.
To be honest, she loved that bracelet even more than she loved her engagement ring.
Of course, to be really honest, she didn’t actually love her engagement ring at all. She sort of hated it.
Not a single person in the world knew this. It was her only real secret, so it was a pity it wasn’t juicier. The ring was an Edwardian antique that had belonged to Nick’s grandmother. Alice had never met Granny Love, but she had apparently been formidable but adorable (she sounded dreadful). Nick’s four sisters, whom Nick called “the Flakes” because of their undeniably flaky tendencies, were crazy about that ring and there had been a lot of bitter