When I Wasn't Watching Read Online Free PDF Page A

in and looked around his old home as if uncomfortable at being here again. He had only lived there a few months, had started his affair even before they had started making plans to move from their old home. Jack’s home.
    Ethan’s eyes flitted round the room and then settled on Ricky, still standing at the kitchen table with his book bag.
    â€˜Hey, kiddo.’
    Ricky’s lip curled. He stared at Ethan until he dropped his eyes, then hoisted his bag onto his shoulder.
    â€˜I said I’ll drive you,’ Lucy protested as he walked towards the door, but Ricky carried on, slamming it behind him. Shocked, Lucy went to go after him but Ethan laid a hand on her arm.
    â€˜Let him go, Luce, he’s bound to be upset.’
    Lucy bit back the retort that sprang to her lips at the cheek of him advising her on her eldest son, the child he had taken on as his and then walked out on. She didn’t want to open that particular can of worms.
    â€˜Don’t call me Luce,’ she snapped instead, the unnecessary shortening of her name annoying her as much as it always had. It was two syllables, for God’s sake, hardly difficult to pronounce.
    She sat down at the table, waving Ethan towards the chair opposite. He took the one next to her instead, leaning forward and taking her hands. Lucy flinched but didn’t pull away. He had slim, long hands. Clever, surgeon’s hands, that had once touched her and held her, but were now holding someone else. She looked down at them dispassionately.
    â€˜How are you?’Lucy couldn’t meet his eyes. She didn’t want him to see the pain in them any more than she wanted to see it in his. It should be a shared pain, something they should face together, but Ethan had given that up. When she didn’t answer he started talking in a broken voice, cracking the way Ricky’s had started to now that he was hitting puberty, and Lucy looked at him properly then and saw the anguish in his eyes.
    â€˜I really thought he wouldn’t get parole, you know? Thought they would never let him out yet. Jack would still only be eleven now.’
    â€˜I know how old he would be.’ Lucy didn’t mean for her words to come out so harsh and yet somehow they did. She didn’t want to do this with him, didn’t want to relive the horror, and couldn’t bring herself to offer a comfort she didn’t feel.
    â€˜Does your wife know you’re here?’ she asked instead and Ethan started, a flash of guilt in his eyes, though he still didn’t remove his hands.
    â€˜No,’ he said, ‘I just wanted to see how you were. To talk.
She
doesn’t understand.’ His voice sounded choked again and Lucy pulled back, wrenching her hands away from him. Ethan looked up at her, hurt, and Lucy realised she was suddenly angry.
    â€˜She doesn’t understand, so you come here, to me? Because
your wife doesn’t understand you
?’ she laughed, and it sounded bitter even to her own ears. ‘Isn’t that what you used to say to her about me when you were fucking her behind my back?’
    Ethan’s eyes grew wide and shocked and Lucy pressed her own hand to her mouth as if to stop any further outburst. She rarely, if ever, swore. And she knew it wasn’t really Ethan she was angry at. When he reached for her again she stood up, bumping her hip against the edge of the table.
    â€˜This is hardly the time, Lucy,’ he reprimanded, regaining some of his usual composure. ‘I came here to talk about Jack.’
    Lucy pressed a hand to her head, which had begun to pound, heralding one of the fierce headaches she suffered on and off. Tension headaches, her doctor called them.
    â€˜Jack’s dead,’ she said. As she spoke the words it occurred to her that in eight years she had never spoken them aloud, had either avoided such simple statements of fact or cloaked the cold truth in less final language. Because she had never