Page 69 of Beautiful Ugly
But then the church doors swing open again.
I hear footsteps on the stone floor but I’m afraid to look. They’re getting closer and Sandy smiles and nods at whoever it is. When I can’t stand the suspense any longer I spin around, unable to process what I am seeing at first.
It’s Abby.
I’m not imagining it.
I’m not hallucinating.
“I’ll leave you two to it,” says Sandy. She takes the walkie-talkie and my mobile from me before heading for the doors. The sound of them closing behind her echoes around the church and the place feels a little colder than it did before. This is not a dream, or a symptom of my insomnia, or a side effect of drinking too much whiskey. It’s really her and she’s standing right in front of me, staring at me with the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.
Finally, she speaks.
“Hi, Grady. I think we need to talk.”
HAPPILY MARRIED
Aftershe disappeared
ABBY
“Tell me again what happened that night.”
“My mobile rang when I was driving home. It was attached to the dashboard displaying my fastest route, and my heart sank when I saw Grady’s name; I was running a little late and I knew he’d be disappointed. It was as though my husband thought my life revolved around his. He’s like a child in that way, always needing attention. So I answered the call and put him on speaker, even though I hate doing that when I’m driving. Especially at night on dark country roads.
“I’m on my way, almost there,” I told him.
“You said you would be here,” he replied, sounding like a whining little boy. “This is important to me.”
I didn’t mention all the things that had been important tomeover the years, things which he made it very clear he couldn’t care less about. Someone had to be the grown-up in our relationship.
“I’ll be there soon, promise. I’ve got fish-and-chips,” I said.
Fish-and-chips had become a bit of a tradition. It’s what we ate on our first official date, and when Grady proposed a few years later. When we moved into the cottage we ate fish-and-chips sitting on a sofa surrounded by cardboard boxes, and it was what he bought me for dinner to celebrate when I got promoted at the newspaper. A jobI used to love but he always hated. Here’s the thing, I don’t even like fish-and-chips. I often found myself just going along with his choices to keep him happy. But that’s my fault, not his.
It was the night he was going to find out if his new book was aNew York Timesbestseller. News that he thought would make him happy and I thought would make it easier to tell him the truth.
“Heard anything?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“Well, get off the phone or they won’t be able to get through.”
I hung up, concentrated on the road.
Grady always resented how hard I worked, but even when I was at home he rarely seemed to notice me. His mind was always elsewhere, normally inside his novels. When we first got together he couldn’t keep his hands off me, but things had changed in that department too. I think there are several varieties of lonely and I have known them all. I actually wondered if he was having an affair at one point—his emotional Morse code wasn’t always easy to interpret—but his love affairs were only ever with his books. He was obsessed with them.
It was his idea to move out of the city and live somewhere more rural. He thought it would help his writing and I didn’t want to get in the way of that. But I missed my friends, so sometimes I met up with them in London after work. Grady got jealous if I came home late. He seemed to think that me wanting to spend time with other people meant I didn’t love him enough. It was as though he thought I only had enough love for one person, and he needed it to always be him. I get that he has abandonment issues because of his mum and dad, but everyone gets fucked up by their parents. It’s almost a rite of passage, and at his age I do think it’s probably time he got over it.
Sometimes he made me feel as though I was invisible.
And I started to wonder what that might be like.
To just vanish.
I was still driving home when he called again.
“Well?” I asked.