This Secret We're Keeping Read Online Free PDF Page A

buy himself some time.
    ‘They weren’t irreconcilable differences. She cheated on you with your brother. That’s why you divorced her.’
    There was a short pause, during which Zak appeared to waver over continuing the pretence or saving himself the trouble and dropping it. Never one to make unnecessary work for himself, he opted for the latter by trying to evade the issue entirely. ‘Really? We’re doing this on our anniversary?’ He glared meaningfully at the champagne bottle, as if to suggest that Jess was not being sufficiently respectful of the occasion. Zak took celebrating seriously, and tended to become indignant when people chucked curveballs at his forward planning.
    ‘Zak, how could you have not told me this?’
    Zak hesitated, his expression betraying nothing, before shrugging defensively. ‘I didn’t want the sympathy vote.
Oh, poor guy – wife shagged his brother. Maybe I’ll go over and cheer him up.
’ He made what Jess had come to think of as his horseradish face, the one he usually pulled over beef wellington in gastropubs. ‘No thanks.’
    ‘But we’ve been together a year,’ Jess reminded him quietly. ‘You could have told me at any time.’
    Zak shrugged again, arms still folded to defend him against low-flying pity missiles. ‘Well, we reached that point, Jess … where it was too bloody late to say anything.’
    ‘So that’s why you don’t speak to your brother,’ Jess concluded. Zak rarely even made reference to him, something she’d naively attributed to sibling rivalry. ‘I thought you just didn’t get on.’
    Zak’s face clouded over slightly. ‘Yeah. We don’t.’
    A tension hung between them now, a palpable patch of cool air in the corner of the crowded bar. ‘So the real story is, Octavia broke your heart,’ Jess said quietly.
    Zak arched his back uncomfortably and looked away from her. ‘Yes, Jessica, she broke my heart. Can we talk about something else now please? It doesn’t matter how itended with me and her if the outcome was exactly the same.’
    ‘It does matter,’ she countered.
    ‘Why? What I told you was true,’ Zak clipped, throwing back another slug of wine. ‘There were irreconcilable differences.’
    ‘You mean adultery,’ she corrected him.
    He lowered his glass. ‘Is that not the same thing?’
    Jess swallowed. ‘So … do you still love her?’
    Zak’s expression of distaste quickly darkened to become deep offence. ‘Is that a serious question?’
    ‘Yes,’ she said hesitantly, though the chill of his stare was making her suddenly doubt herself.
    ‘Wow,’ he said then, leaning back again in his chair and running a hand through his mop of brown hair like a Wall Street trader being caught red-handed with his fingers in the Forex. ‘I did not see this coming. So much for the champagne.’
    Zak’s scant reserves of patience rarely held firm under pressure, so Jess decided not to push him on the love issue. ‘I just can’t believe you would hide something like that from me,’ she said, a final attempt to dismantle his obstinacy.
    ‘Okay, Jess,’ Zak countered in a tone of mounting exasperation that implied there was something she was failing fundamentally to grasp, ‘if you really want to know, I never considered it to be that relevant, okay? I still don’t. It’s in the past.’
    Punctuating this by slinging back the last of his wine and setting down the glass with only slightly less force than he’d have needed to smash it, Zak chose to close their debate with a form of ultimatum.
    ‘Look, are we going to forget this now and celebrate our anniversary? Because, if not, I’ll piss off back to the beach house. It’s been a long week, Jess, and I was sick enough ofdiscussing Octavia when we were getting divorced, let alone twelve sodding months later.’
    Though still unsettled by his deception, there was a tiny part of Jess that was beginning to wonder if perhaps he was right. Maybe it wasn’t relevant. Hadn’t everyone had