Keli’s trembling hands opened her phone, checked the text again.
Hi. Sorry to do this, but I think you’ve been sleeping with my boyfriend. Can you call me back?
Yep, it still said the same thing. She hadn’t imagined it.
She clicked on the text, got the number of the sender, pressed ‘call’, then put it on speaker and placed it in the middle of the table. It rang twice before it was answered. ‘Hello?’
Keli froze. Gulped. Saw her wide-eyed shock and panic reflected right back at her from Yvie.
She tried to speak, but her vocal cords were stuck. She cleared her throat. Tried again. ‘Hi, I got a text from this number earlier. This morning. A couple of hours ago.’ She was rambling, so she pulled it back to the point. ‘The text said something about me knowing your boyfriend. I think you must have the wrong number.’
A pause. The woman on the other end of the phone was probably embarrassed. She’d been upset, and must have keyed the wrong numbers.
‘Is your name Keli?’
Her gasp was audible. Across from her, Yvie had her hand over her mouth and looked like she was about to combust.
Keli somehow managed a strangled, ‘Yes.’
‘Then I haven’t got the wrong number.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand…’
‘My boyfriend,’ the other woman interjected, ‘has texts from you. Loads of them. And he probably deleted them from his phone, but they showed up on his iPad. The one that I’m staring at now.’
There was a roar inside Keli’s skull. Nooooooooooooo. It couldn’t be. It just couldn’t.
‘Oh my God, I had no idea,’ she blurted, scrambling to make sense of this. Maybe this was a recent girlfriend. Or they’d split up and got back together. ‘How long has he been your boyfriend?’
‘Three years. And no, before you go all Ross and Rachel on me, we’ve never been on a break.’
That delivered an absolute whammy of a punch to her gut, and there was a pause that stretched until Keli forced her lungs to kick back in. Yet still she thought there had to be some mistake. It came to her that there was one way that she would know for sure.
‘I’m sorry, but I still can’t get my head around this. Are we definitely talking about the same guy. Is it… Ryan?’ she asked, then held her breath.
The other woman had no such hesitation. ‘Ryan…’ she repeated slowly, then followed it up with an almost triumphant, ‘Ryan Manning. So now you know we’re on the same page. With the same guy.’
Keli responded to Yvie’s questioning expression with a nod of her head. Ryan. Bastard. Manning.
She had no idea what to say next, but the other woman solved that problem, by going on, ‘Look, I can hear from your voice that this is all coming as a complete shock to you.’
‘It is. And I need to tell you I’m so sorry. If I’d known… Well, if I’d known I promise you this would never have happened.’
Keli wouldn’t blame this woman if she didn’t believe her. Not in the least. I mean, even to Keli it sounded ridiculous. How could she have gone out with someone for three months, fallen head over heels for him, given him her whole heart and not known he was already attached to someone else?
Her mind flew backwards. The night they’d met. It had been at a party, and they’d literally bumped into each other, then he’d insisted on refreshing her spilled glass of wine. They’d talked all night and she’d been so utterly captivated by him that she’d allowed him to take her home. They’d sat up talking until dawn, when he had to go to work, but not once did he seem uneasy, or act like there was somewhere else he should be.
Then there was Christmas. She’d done a double shift to let Sima have the day off with her kids, but he’d come round and picked her up when she’d finished at 11p.m. On Hogmanay, they’d celebrated the turn of the New Year in her apartment, lying naked in front of the fire, watching his favourite old movie,The Sting, and eating a dinner that was cold because they’d been too lost in each other to eat it when the timer had buzzed and the oven had switched itself off.
They’d even spent two nights in a log cabin at Loch Lomond, not long before he’d disappeared off the face of the earth. That’s what had been so confusing. That weekend, he’d told her he thought he could be falling in love with her, and she’d told him the same. They’d stayed in bed from the moment they arrived until they left, having food sent over from a nearby hotel. It wasperfect. Yes, it was a whirlwind, but it felt completely real. He was the first man she’d ever said that to. And he was the first man who chose to walk away from her.
How could he have done all of that if he had a girlfriend? Apart from the emotional and physical betrayal, how could he possibly have explained his absences, especially on special days? This didn’t make sense. There was still part of her that believed it had to be a mistake. Or a prank. Or some other kind of messed-up scam to get information from her.
Keli tuned back into the conversation, admitting, ‘It’s a complete shock. I still can’t quite believe it.’
‘And I’m guessing you’re wondering if this is some kind of crazy set-up.’ It was like she was reading her mind. The strange thing was, the woman at the other end didn’t sound angry now. It was as though all the air had gone out of her ire, and she just sounded deflated. Confused. Crushed.
Keli recognised all those emotions because it was how she’d been feeling for the last month. ‘Well, it’s shocking and more than a little confusing. I have so many questions.’
