The Other Wife

"A stranger rang me in the dark to tell me her husband was gone too. That was the night it stopped being only mine."

The two hours Karl Jenkins had given me came and went. Then it was three, and then the last of the light went out of the windows and I was still in his chair in the dark, the phone face-up and silent in my lap.

So I stopped waiting on it and started working it. I went back through Nial's life a name at a time, the way I had every night that week, except that by the Wednesday I was scraping the bottom of the barrel. The blokes off the job sites, who had not seen him. The man at the timber yard, who had not seen him. A cousin in Devonport I had met twice at weddings, kind and useless. An old apprentice of Nial's I ran down through Facebook, who was sorry, and had no idea, and hoped he would turn up, and plainly had a dinner going cold somewhere behind him. Every call went the same way. Every name I put through came back empty, and left the house a little quieter than it had been before.

The truth was, I no longer knew what I was even asking them. Two days before I had been hunting a cheating husband; that afternoon, when Karl Jenkins had gone quiet on the line and hung up on me to go and look at whatever had landed on his desk, the cheating husband had cracked straight down the middle, and the other one had come back — the one in a ditch, the one who had been taken — and now I was ringing a dead-end apprentice's number not knowing whether I was chasing a liar or a body. I had two dead husbands in my head, and only one of them could be real, and I could not have told anybody which.

So when the phone went off in my lap in the dark, I came up out of that chair as though I had been electrocuted.

It was not a number I knew. Of course it was not; none of them ever were any more. I had it to my ear before the second ring had finished. "Hello? Yes — hello?"

A woman's voice. Not young. Careful, and frightened, and working hard not to be — I heard all of that in the first three words, because hearing it in people was the one thing I still had, and because it was the exact sound of my own voice played back to me.

"Is that Jenny Triffett?"

"Speaking." A dozen guesses went through me at once — police, hospital, some fresh horror — and under all of them the one I could not kill: Nial. It's something to do with Nial. "Who is this?"

"My name's Sharon. Sharon Pafistis. You don't know me." A breath, gathered up. "I saw the post about your husband. On the Facebook. I wrote to the email on it, the — the findnial one — and the girl who runs your page wrote back, ever so kind, and she gave me your number. She said you wouldn't mind. I hope you don't mind."

The girl who runs your page. I sat down slowly on the arm of the chair. There was a whole inbox somewhere with my husband's name inside the address of it, filling up in the dark with strangers, and I did not have the key to it — and a seventeen-year-old did, and she had read this woman's message, and decided it was one to pass along, and handed out my telephone number to do it. I put that where I had been putting everything about Serena all week: in the drawer marked later, in the drawer marked you are being mad, Jenny, the child is only helping. "No," I said. "No, I don't mind. Go on."

"It's my husband." The careful thing in her voice came apart on the word. "It's my husband as well. He's gone. Adrian. He's been gone three days."

I did not say anything for a moment. I could not. Something went very cold and very still along the whole length of me.

"Tell me," I said.

She told me, and it was my own story coming back down the line in a stranger's mouth. Adrian had left for work on the Monday morning — an ordinary Monday, an ordinary morning, he had kissed her and kissed the kids and said he would not be long — and he had not come home, and his phone rang out to voicemail, and his car was gone, and there was no note and no message and no reason, and half of it was word for word what I would have said myself. When I asked her, already knowing, what the police had told her, she gave a small broken laugh with no laughter anywhere in it.

"They said he walked out." Her voice had gone flat with it. "On me and the kids. Just — decided, and went, and didn't say. As good as told me to go home and wait for him to come to his senses." A pause. "Adrian would sooner cut his own arm off than leave those children. And they looked at me like I was a silly woman who couldn't read her own marriage."

Every word of it was a stone dropped into me, because every word of it was mine. The silly woman who could not read her own marriage — that was me at the police counter on the Saturday, that was the whole of Linda Hodgman's face. Here it was again, the same words and the same shrug and the same husband-who-never-would, worn now by a different frightened wife at the other end of a telephone, in a city that had suddenly stopped feeling big enough to hold two of these by accident.

For a moment neither of us said anything at all, two women breathing at each other down a line, and I felt something I had not felt in five days: I was not standing in the soundproof box on my own. Somebody else was in it with me. Then, hard on the heels of that — because my mind no longer did comfort without doing dread directly after — came the other thing, the one I did not want to look at and could not look away from. Two men. Two ordinary men, a good husband and a good father each, gone within a day of one another, out of the same small city, into the same silence, and their two wives handed the same lie by the same tired police to make them go quiet. That was not two things. Nothing in me believed that was two things.

"Jenny." Sharon's voice had steadied, the way mine did when I had decided something. "I know it's a strange thing to ask of a person you've never met. But could we meet? Properly, in the daylight, somewhere ordinary. I've had nobody but police who don't believe me and family who want me to stop saying it — and you're the first person who hasn't told me I've got it wrong. I think we should talk. I think we might see something, the two of us, that neither of us can see on her own."

Every careful instinct I had left told me to be frightened of it. A voice on a phone. A stranger who had come by my number through a girl I did not fully trust, carrying a story cut to the exact shape of my own — and I had spent a week learning that the things cut to the exact shape of what I wanted were the things most likely to be traps. I knew all that. I heard the whole sensible chorus of it.

"Yes," I said. "Where."

She wanted somewhere public, and so did I. We settled on the school — St Michael's, the front lawn by the chapel, four o'clock the next afternoon, when the girls would be pouring out to their buses and no two women on a bench could come to any harm in all that daylight and all those witnesses. It was the most careful arrangement two frightened people could make. We made it the way women arrange to meet a stranger off the internet, which was exactly what we were.

I hung up, and I did not sit back down in the dark. I turned on the lamp — the first light I had let into that room all day — and I found a pen, and on the back of one of the MISSING flyers the girls had run off, under my husband's cropped and laughing face, I wrote down a name I had not known when I woke that morning. Adrian Pafistis. Monday.

Two names now, under the one photograph. Two men gone in a single weekend, out of one small city, and two wives left holding the very same lie. I would not let myself guess what joined them — guessing was how I had come to be standing over a bin full of another woman's underwear with a hole where my certainty used to be — but a line ran between those two names on the flyer, and I could feel it in the cold room like a draught coming in under a door. Somewhere on the far side of it was whatever had taken my husband. For the first time in five days, I was not the only one standing at the door.