Free The Mistress's Revenge by Tamar Cohen

you, but occasionally I do wonder if Daniel is all there, or if some tiny little bit of him, the bit that deals with, say, self-awareness, has somehow become dislodged and sneezed out somewhere along the way.
    “What about Mum?” he asked, leaning his head back and running his hands through the overly long blond hair of which he remains justifiably proud. “What would Mum say in her acceptance speech?”
    Tilly glanced over at me, her green eyes sharp like broken bottles.
    “Oh Mum,” she said. “Mum wouldn’t even remember to mention us at all.”
    L ater, when all the others had gone to bed (when did Daniel start going to bed at the same time as the children, I wonder? It seems to have happened without me even noticing it. We used to watch latefilms together long after the children were asleep, lying at opposite ends of the sofa, stroking each others’ feet through our socks, but nowadays I look up from the News at Ten and find myself sitting on my own, the rest of the house shallowly breathing in the darkness), I got out my laptop and watched the replay of the award ceremony all over again. Amazing thing isn’t it, this instant repeat facility we all have now, this ability to endlessly relive our lives again and again on YouTube or Catch Up? I wish it had been around when I was younger, I really do. There’s so much I seem to have forgotten.
    When it got to the section with your speech, I kept my fingers poised over the pause and rewind buttons. I know it was silly but I wanted to be in complete control.
    I freeze-framed through the minute and a half, watching the way your face evolved seamlessly from jokey to tearfully sincere and how your oh-so-familiar hands played with the rather garish award, your bitten nails pink against the shiny gold-colored metal. Zooming in again and again until the point where the picture started to blur at the edges, I gazed at your eyes, dark-lashed and puddle-colored. It was the closest I’d been to you in fourteen weeks (not that I’m counting, you understand, well, no more than I might count the number of weeks after, say, the death of a second-division friend). I noticed that your curls looked slightly darker, although still flecked through with the occasional dashing streak of silver. Have you had a little bit of salon work done, Clive? If so I must congratulate you, they’ve been terribly subtle. I know how secretly vain you are about your hair, even while proclaiming that you’d “just as soon shave the whole lot off and have done with it.” I remember lying in hotel beds in a tangle of boil-washed sheets watching through the open bathroom door as you reached into your coat pocket and withdrew a nylon-bristled hair brush and a travelsized bottle of “taming serum.”
    “I’ve never known a man to take quite so much trouble over his hair,” I told you, amused.
    “It’s only because it’s so dreadful,” you’d tell me, anxious that I shouldn’t believe you vain. “My hair is totally unmanageable.”
    There was a trace of pride when you said that, as if your intransigenthair was somehow an indication of an ungovernable personality, someone who chose to live outside of the rules.
    I miss running my fingers through your hair, feeling those two slightly raised scars on your scalp, evidence of childhood misadventures. I miss the way you’d suddenly turn and, with your back now against the bathroom mirror, you’d pull me toward you so that I was gazing up into your eyes, the same distance apart as I am now from my laptop screen. I miss the sudden change in atmosphere, the imperceptible intake of breath, the sexual charge that made the hairs on my arms stand up. I miss it all. I miss it all. I miss it all.
    After a while, when I’d stared at your magnified face on the screen for so long I felt my eyeballs must surely carry a negative imprint of your features, I forwarded on until I came to a close-up of Susan. Then, again, I froze the frame. Leaning back on the