Beth asked to meet on Saturday somewhere that did not have curtains moving whenever we arrived.
We chose a café on the other side of town. She came with her cousin, Rachel, who bought a takeaway coffee and left us after checking Beth was happy for her to go.
“She asks,” Beth said when the door closed. “Every time.”
She sounded grateful for the repetition.
I did not ask how she was. There were too many possible answers, and none seemed suited to the queue forming beside our table.
“Have you eaten?”
“Toast.”
“Recently?”
“Yesterday.”
We ordered sandwiches. She removed the tomato from hers and put it on my plate without asking. It was the most familiar thing either of us had done since Thursday.
“I’ve told them about the appointment,” she said.
“At the hall?”
She nodded.
“All of it. The messages arranging it and the cancellation.”
“Good.”
“You sound like Vivienne.”
“Sorry.”
Beth shook her head.
“No. I didn’t mean that. I’m tired of feeling as though every decision gets marked.”
I put down my cup.
“What would you like me to know?”
She thought about it before answering.
“That I wasn’t planning to go back to him.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
“Some people will. Because I agreed to meet.”
Martin had offered to bring a case of equipment to the hall. It was not the portfolio I had stored, but display fittings, a measuring tool and materials for work. He would be there dealing with paperwork anyway, he had said.
“At first it sounded practical. Public building, quick exchange. Then he started adding things he wanted to discuss.”
“Your marriage.”
“My attitude. My friends. What he was owed.”
She took her phone out, considered it, then put it away again.
“I don’t need to show you every message, do I?”
“No.”
“I keep feeling I have to prove the whole marriage. Otherwise people will think I’ve exaggerated something.”
I looked around the café. A couple were arguing quietly over a train timetable. An older man was reading a newspaper with a magnifying glass. Everyone had brought a life into the room without being required to display it.
“You can tell me what you want me to understand,” I said. “That doesn’t mean I get to inspect everything.”
Beth let out a breath.
“He said the equipment would be waiting. Then he wanted an hour. Then he said he deserved an evening without my friends interfering.”
“So the agreement changed.”
“Exactly.”
Her relief at the plain description made me angry in a way I kept out of my voice. She had spent too much time being told that noticing a change meant she had misunderstood the original promise.
Beth took a bite of bread and made herself swallow before continuing.
“I cancelled at Vivienne’s. I told him I would arrange another way to collect it.”
“Why didn’t you tell us earlier?”
She looked towards the window.
“Because I didn’t want five people telling me which mistake I was making.”
There were only five of us altogether. I did not correct her arithmetic. I understood the feeling.
“You thought we’d stop you.”
“I thought I’d spend an hour explaining myself and still be treated like I hadn’t understood.”
I remembered all the questions I had nearly asked about her room.
“I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t do that.”
“I wanted to.”
For the first time, she smiled a little.
“Then thank you for resisting.”
A waiter collected the empty cups. Beth asked for another coffee. Her voice became clear and practical while ordering, then quieter again when he left.
“If I’d gone—”
She stopped.
I felt every comforting phrase I had ever heard crowding towards my mouth. None of them belonged to something I could know.
“You cancelled an appointment,” I said. “You didn’t decide what happened after that.”
She looked at me for a long moment.
“I keep wanting somebody to tell me he was different that evening. That I would have known.”
“I don’t know.”
“No.”
Her coffee arrived. She moved the spoon from one side of the saucer to the other.
“Rachel says I don’t have to feel one thing.”
“She sounds sensible.”
“It’s annoying.”
We ate the rest of the sandwiches. Beth told me she would return to her rented room after another night with Rachel. Her work materials were there. She wanted to see them somewhere ordinary.
Before leaving, she showed me a message from Imogen. It was kind, carefully worded, offering time if she needed it.
“I don’t want to disappear from work again.”
“Then tell her what you can do. You don’t need to decide the whole month today.”
Beth wrote a reply while I paid for our coffees. When I came back, she was looking at a second message.
This one was from a woman who had attended the preview.
I’m so sorry. Is it true the police think you were supposed to be there?
Beth laid the phone face down.
“I told the truth,” she said. “And somehow that’s the part getting passed around.”