Breaking Faith by Jo Bannister

Author:Jo Bannister
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-01-12T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Sixteen

By close of play Deacon had confirmation that Michelle Rollins (sic) was alive and well, living in Naples with Luigi and four children, and astonished that anyone might think she’d been murdered.

Which left Sasha Wade.

It didn’t mean the body had to be Sasha. There were no clothes, no personal effects, no help from DNA or dental work, no old injuries. If the girl at The Diligence had wanted to stay anonymous she could hardly have done a better job.

Finally Deacon remembered Brodie. It was almost six o’clock: he thought he’d give her a nice surprise and drop by instead of phoning.

As soon as he saw her face he knew they were in trouble. In spite of that she had to spell it out before he understood what kind of trouble it was, and say most of it again before he believed her. The first time he thought it was a bad joke: that if he waited and didn’t panic she’d suddenly grin her boyish grin and admit as much. So he stood frozen, refusing to react, waiting for the punch-line; and she, her heart riven, had to go through it all again, a sentence at a time, giving it time to sink in. What she’d done. With whom. Why. At least that part of the story was soon told. She could offer no reason.

Finally Deacon believed what he was hearing. Anger, and even more than that shock, locked him rigid. For much of their relationship he had been afraid of losing her, but not like this – to an affair so casual it hardly merited the name. An animal coupling between strangers, a mere scratching of mutual itches, in an office where the paperwork overflowed the desk and the sofa was barely five feet long.

But the wall was eight feet high.

She saw him recoil as the thought hit him. ‘When was this?’ His voice was like gravel.

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

The magnitude of her treachery rocked him. ‘You were with me the night before!’

‘Yes,’ she said simply.

‘And again this morning …’ He looked around the little office incredulously. ‘Right here. You asked me …’

‘Yes, I did,’ Brodie said. ‘I needed you.’

‘What, for comparison?’

She’d told Daniel he wouldn’t hit her: now she almost wished he would. She thought anything would be better than the dumb pain in his face, and the knowledge that he loved her and she’d done that to him, for no reason. On a whim. A chance presented and she’d taken it without regard for the hurt it would cause. They weren’t married, but after a year together it was disingenuous to consider herself single. Jack Deacon was her partner, she owed him fidelity She could end their relationship with a word, but until then she wasn’t free to respond when another man’s hormones serenaded hers.

When her husband told Brodie there was someone he loved more than he loved her it was as if the earth had opened. As if nothing could be trusted any more. She’d screamed and cried; she’d berated him from the depths of her terrified soul; she’d begged him to stay.

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