Faithful by Louise Bay

wounded me.
    I just wanted to escape.
    Apparently he texted me to see where I was while Anna was booking the trip. She confiscated my phone so there would be no drunk-dialing, no room for his excuses, no more pain. He assumed I’d worked through the night at work.
    Panic washed through me. All those nights I assumed he was working, he was with her, in her bed. All the guilt I felt at him working so hard for our future and he was fucking around on me. Was he in love with her? Or was it just the sex? Fran was experienced , that was for sure. She was probably much more adventurous than I ever was. I tried to push images of them together out of my mind, but they kept creeping back in—Fran’s hands in Charlie’s hair, Charlie’s tongue over Fran’s neck. Christ, I needed a drink.
    “Excuse me, can I get a glass of wine?” I asked the stewardess. Thankfully , Anna had managed to get seats in business class on my miles, and the crew in business were always much more accepting of women getting drunk before noon than they were at the back of the plane. Or at least they faked their acceptance better.
    “Certainly madam.”
    I turned to Anna. “When did I stop being ‘miss’ and become ‘madam’?”
    “The day you hit 30, sweetheart,” Anna replied without missing a beat, engrossed in another magazine. She seemed to have a never-ending supply. “There’s some kind of invisible sign women start to hold the day they turn 30. It’s genetic, or a pheromone or something.”
    Oh my god, I was 30 and single. I felt I’d been punched in the stomach. My life was not meant to turn out like this. I handed the magazine back to Anna and started to sob again.
    “The baby, Fran’s baby. Charlie’s the father , isn’t he?” Anna and I had skirted around Fran’s pregnancy, neither of us mentioning it since I dropped the bomb of Charlie and Fran’s affair 24 hours ago. Anna finally put down her magazine and turned to me.
    “Honestly? I don’t know. Maybe.”
    “What about that DJ? It could be his, couldn’t it?” I was desperate to somehow make the situation less dire that it really was.
    “It could be , Leah. But, realistically, the DJ may have not existed. If you think about it, Fran didn’t juggle men. She slept with lots of people, but they didn’t overlap. At least I never thought they did. I’m not sure I really know who she was or is.”
    “How long do you think it has been going on? Since before the engagement , I guess,” I answered myself. “I thought she seemed a bit subdued when I told you guys, but I thought she was just disappointed that she wasn’t at the same point in her life—I suppose I was right, she wanted to be at the exact same point in her life, with the same guy ... Jesus!”
    “Look , babe, I don’t think there’s any point in torturing yourself about it. Whether the baby is his or not shouldn’t matter to you anymore. They have both betrayed you, whatever the genetic code of that poor child. At least you know now and you didn’t end up marrying him and finding out later that he’d cheated with your friend—not that I would ever touch him with a bargepole, you know that.”
    I did know that. Anna had never liked Charlie. Not that she was pleased with what he had done —I believed wholeheartedly that she would never want me to feel like this—but I think she was relieved that her instincts about him had been right and she no longer had to worry about what was going to come. It was here. And she was right, there was no point in torturing myself about him and Fran and the baby. But it wasn’t that easy. It was all I could think about.
    How long had it been going on?
    What had I done to send him off looking for something more than me?
    What was it about Fran that attracted him?
    Well, I suppose the attraction bit was obvious. She was tall and thin with curly blond hair and a wide smile. I’m sure she could model if she wanted to; she was gorgeous. In comparison, my figure with hips