Free The Dead Wife's Handbook by Hannah Beckerman Page A

that profile, I promise. I’ll just leave it there, untouched, gathering virtual dust until such time as you’re ready for it, whether that’s in a few months or a few years’ time. Okay?’
    Before Max has a chance to respond, Ellie comes bounding in from outside. Harriet snaps the laptop shut.

    ‘Is it lunchtime yet? I’m starving.’
    ‘You’re bang on cue, angel. I’m just about to serve.’
    As Max swings open the oven door and pulls out the loaded tray, I’m reminded of the smell of roast lamb I can see steaming in front of him. I’m not hungry – I don’t get hungry any more – but the recalled smell is one of nostalgia and longing, a smell that warms me from the inside out and makes me yearn to be part of that nourishing domesticity.
    The steam from the oven begins to thicken excessively into an impenetrable white mist and before I’ve had a chance to savour a final view of Max and Ellie today, I find myself back alone above the clouds. Not even a spectator’s invite to Sunday lunch for me today, it would seem.
    I wonder what Max’s reply would have been, had Ellie not arrived to interrupt the conversation. I wonder whether Max will agree to leave the profile online or whether he’ll insist on Harriet withdrawing him from the virtual dating pool. I wonder whether it will take only one bored, lonely evening for Max’s curiosity to get the better of him and for him to begin surfing the profiles of women who may one day wish to replace me.
    I try to console myself with all that I know about Max, about the man he is and the relationship we cherished.
    I recall his hatred of blind dating and how, when we’d been together just long enough to confess such things to one another, he admitted his relief at being liberated from anxious evenings in the company of hopeful strangers.
    I hear his words to my mum on the evening of my funeral, after the guests had left, after the dining table hadbeen cleared of haphazardly constructed sandwiches, after Ellie had been tucked up in bed, when he’d told her he wouldn’t have been able to continue without me if it weren’t for Ellie’s existence.
    I recollect his words to Harriet today, sentiments that aren’t, surely, those of a man on the brink of contemplating a romantic life without me.
    I think about all these things and, eventually, I manage to entrench myself in reassurance.
    Max isn’t any more ready to move on than I am. I have to trust him, trust the legacy of our marriage, trust that if time is a great healer then we are both yet in need of a longer passage.
    I have to trust all of that because there is, after all, little else I can do.

Chapter 6
    Trust, it transpires, can often be misplaced.
    Max is sitting alone in a pub on Portobello Road, tapping his fingers on the table in rhythmic succession, betraying his nerves to anyone observing him with anything more than fleeting attention. Given that it’s Friday night in an overcrowded Notting Hill pub populated by people a decade younger and a generation cooler than Max or I, luckily no one else seems to be taking much notice of him at all.
    It’s been over a month since my last visit, a fact of which I’m aware due to the frustrating tail end of a conversation between Max and Harriet I was privy to last night during a tantalizingly brief few minutes of access. I discovered that Max has been doing a lot of thinking lately which has, inexplicably, led him to the conclusion that it’s time he ‘took the plunge’ into the murky waters of the online dating pool. Harriet, unsurprisingly, endorsed the decision, reassuring him it’s ‘best to get it over with sooner rather than later’, like ‘the ripping off of a well-worn plaster’. Joan, meanwhile, has apparently continued to ‘encourage’ Max to ‘get out and about’ more, hence the purpose of this evening’s arrangement is as much to ‘get Mum off my case’ as it is to dip his own tentative toes into the dating waters.
    It was horrible