Free The Third Wife by Lisa Jewell

away! Come and talk to us! Come on, Miss Hot!’
    She smiled and waved at them apologetically and they catcalled after her as she hurried by.
    ‘Who was that?’
    ‘Just some boys.’
    ‘Christ, Cat, be careful.’
    ‘They’re just kids, Dad. Look, I’ll call you when I find out where she’s going!’
    Cat followed the blonde woman through the estate and back through the metal gates on to Archway Road. Then she saw the woman begin to run, her rucksack bouncing up and down urgently against her back. At first Cat thought she was running from her. Then she saw that she was running for a bus which was already letting on the last person in the queue. Cat touched her fingers against the edges of her Oyster card and began to run too. Cat didn’t do running as a rule. Generally she would rather miss the train, miss the bus, than turn herself into a jelly on legs, but this called for a change of style. And she was, at least, wearing a sports bra. She saw the blonde woman leap on to the steps of the bus just as the driver had been about to close the door. She pushed herself harder. She could feel the meat of each individual buttock lifting and dropping with every stride. She tried to catch the driver’s eye as she got closer. But it was too late. The doors hissed and folded, the bus changed gear, and by the time she got to the bus stop it was nothing but a belching, farting box of fumes hurtling away from her down the bus lane.

Eleven
    On the weekend after his meeting with Jean, Adrian got a phone call from Susie in Hove.
    ‘Darling,’ she said. He couldn’t remember Susie ever calling him Adrian. ‘I need to talk to you. Are you free today? For a chat?’
    He put down his coffee mug and said, ‘Yes. Sure. What’s up?’
    ‘I’d rather not talk on the phone, darling. Can you come down? To the house?’ Both his ex-wives referred to their homes as ‘the house’ as though theirs was the definitive one.
    ‘Today?’
    ‘Please. If you can. Bring a child if you need to.’
    ‘No, they’re away this weekend. I’m unencumbered.’
    ‘Good. When can you come?’
    Adrian considered the time and his state of readiness and said, ‘I could leave in about half an hour. Actually, I could leave now.’
    ‘Oh. Good. Thank you, darling. You are such a good boy. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.’
    Adrian arrived at the house in Hove just before lunchtime, carrying a bunch of lilac stocks. The sky was a uniform blue and the sun was high in the sky casting brightly off the stucco buildings and the shingled beach. Moving down here had been Susie’s idea. She, like Adrian, was a Londoner, but unlike Adrian she had no emotional tie to the city and couldn’t get used to living there after three years at Sussex University. She’d secretly taken the train down to Brighton twice a week after she’d discovered she was pregnant. Apparently she’d seen more than thirty properties. And then one day, about seven months into her pregnancy, she’d brought Adrian down to the coast for ‘lunch with friends’ and walked him briskly away from their friends’ house in Brighton, along the seafront to Hove and right up to the front door of the little Edwardian cottage where they’d lived for the next ten years. Adrian had mixed feelings about the area now. This was the place where he’d become a father, the trendy young dad, carrying his fat babies along the beach in a sling, pushing them along windswept pavements to nurseries and childminders. This was where his grown-up life had started. But it was also where he’d felt stifled and wrong-footed. Where he’d woken each morning thinking: When did the party end? Why I am here knee-deep in nappies living with a scatty, badly dressed woman who calls me ‘Daddy’? And what happened to London? Yes, for most of his ten years in Hove, Adrian had dreamed of London. And he still wasn’t sure whether it was Caroline he’d fallen in love with when he was thirty-five, or whether it was the