The Last Letter from Your Lover(97)
Author: Jojo Moyes

She glances at her watch, then signals to the waiter for a second glass of wine. He’s now twenty minutes late. On any other occasion she would have been mutely furious, but she’s so nervous now that a small part of her wonders whether she might throw up at the mere sight of him. Yes, that’s always a good welcome. And then she glances up to find a woman standing at the other side of her table.

Ellie’s first thought is that she’s a waitress, and then she wonders why she isn’t holding the glass of wine. Then she realizes that not only is the woman wearing a navy coat, rather than a waitress’s uniform, but she is staring at her, a little too intently, like someone about to start singing to themselves on the bus.

“Hello, Ellie.”

Ellie blinks. “I’m sorry,” she says, after her mind has flicked through a mental Rolodex of recent contacts and turned up nothing. “Do we know each other?”

“Oh, I think so. I’m Jessica.”

Jessica. Her mind is blank. Nicely cut hair. Good legs. Perhaps a little tired. Suntan. And then it explodes onto her consciousness. Jessica. Jess.

The woman registers her shock. “Yes, I thought you might recognize my name. You probably didn’t want to put a face to it, did you? Didn’t want to think too much about me. I suppose John’s having a wife was a bit of an inconvenience to you.”

Ellie can’t speak. She’s dimly aware of the other diners as they glance her way, having picked up on some strange vibration emanating from table 15.

Jessica Armor is going through text messages on a familiar mobile phone. Her voice lifts a little as she reads them out: “‘Feeling very wicked today. Get away. Don’t care how you do it, but get away. Will make it worth your while.’ Hmm, and here’s a good one. ‘Should be writing up interview with MP’s wife, but mind keeps drifting back to last Tues. Bad boy!’ Oh, and my personal favorite. ‘Have been to Agent Provocateur. Photo attached . . .’” When she looks at Ellie again, her voice is shaking with barely suppressed rage. “It’s pretty hard to compete with that when you’re nursing two sick children and coping with the builders. But, yes, Tuesday the twelfth. I do remember that day. He brought me a bunch of flowers to apologize for being so late.”

Ellie’s mouth has opened but no words come out. Her skin is prickling.

“I went through his phone on holiday. I’d wondered who he was ringing from the bar, and then I found your message. ‘Please call. Just once. Need to hear from you. X.’” She laughs mirthlessly. “How very touching. He thinks it’s been stolen.”

Ellie wants to crawl under the table. She wants to shrink to nothing, to evaporate.

“I’d like to hope you end up a miserable, lonely woman. But actually, I hope you have children one day, Ellie Haworth. Then you’ll know how it feels to be vulnerable. And to have to fight, to be constantly vigilant, just to make sure your children get to grow up with a father. Think about that the next time you’re purchasing see-through lingerie to entertain my husband, won’t you?”

Jessica Armor walks away through the tables and out into the sunshine. There may have been a hush in the restaurant; it’s impossible for Ellie to tell over the ringing in her ears. Eventually, cheeks flaming, hands trembling, she motions to a waiter for the bill.

As he approaches, she mutters something about having to leave unexpectedly. She isn’t sure what she’s saying: her voice no longer seems to belong to her. “The bill?” she says.

He gestures toward the door. His smile is sympathetic. “No need, madam. The lady paid for you.”

Ellie walks back to the office, impervious to traffic, to jostling commuters on pavements, to the rebuking eyes of the Big Issue sellers. She wants to be in her little flat with the door shut, but her precarious position at work means that’s impossible. She walks through the newspaper office, conscious of the eyes of other people, convinced deep down that everyone must see her shame, see what Jessica Armor saw, as if it were drawn upon her, like a scarlet letter.

“You okay, Ellie? You’re awfully pale.” Rupert leans around from behind his monitor. Someone has fixed an “incinerate” sticker to the back of his screen.

“Headache.” Her voice sticks in the back of her throat.

“Terri’s got pills—she has pills for everything, that girl,” he muses, and disappears behind his monitor again.

She sits at her desk and turns on her computer, scanning the e-mails. There it is.

Have lost phone. Picking up new one lunchtime. Will e-mail you new number. Jx

She checks the time. It had arrived in her in-box while she was interviewing Jennifer Stirling. She closes her eyes, seeing again the image that has swum in front of them for the past hour: Jessica Armor’s set jaw, the terrifying eyes, the way her hair moved around her face while she spoke, as if it was electrified by her anger, her hurt. Some tiny part of her had recognized that in different circumstances she would have liked the look of this woman, might have wanted to go for a drink with her. When she opens her eyes again, she doesn’t want to see John’s words, doesn’t want to see this version of herself reflected in them. It’s as if she’s woken from a particularly vivid dream, one that has lasted a year. She knows the extent of her mistake. She deletes his message.

“Here.” Rupert places a cup of tea on her desk. “Might make you feel better.”

Rupert never makes anyone tea. The other feature writers have run books in the past on how long it will take him to head to the canteen, and he’s always been a racing certainty. She doesn’t know whether to be touched by this rare act of sympathy or afraid of why he feels she’s in need of it.

“Thanks,” she says, and takes it.

It’s as he sits down that she spies a familiar name on a different e-mail: Phillip O’Hare. Her heart stops, the humiliations of the last hour temporarily forgotten. She clicks on it, and sees that it is from the Phillip O’Hare who works for the Times.

Hi—A little confused by your message. Can you call me?

She wipes her eyes. Work, she tells herself, is the answer to everything. Work is now the only thing. She’ll find out what happened to Jennifer’s lover, and Jennifer will forgive her for what she’s about to do. She’ll have to.

She dials the direct line at the bottom of the e-mail. A man answers on the second ring. She can hear the familiar hum of a newsroom in the background. “Hi,” she says, her voice tentative. “It’s Ellie Haworth. You sent me an e-mail?”