Leaving at Noon (5 page)

“
Well, I do make a helluva
margarita.”

“
That you do.” Zoey set
the glass on the coaster before her but couldn’t get it to balance.
It rested on the edge and wobbled, liquid sloshing over the
sides.

“
And you make a sloppy
drunk.” Fiona handed over a serviette. The concern on her face was
evident. Zoey noticed it through the drink-induced fog.

“
That I do.” Wiping up the
mess proved too taxing, so she flattened the serviette and placed
it over the spill instead, hoping it would soak up the liquid. Then
she soaked up the rest of the glass, emptying it in a long
swallow.

“
Is he having an
affair?”

She gawked at Fiona. “Is who having an
affair?”

“
The pope.” Fiona rolled
her eyes. “Who do you think?”

“
Theo?”

“
Yeah, Zo.”

The question washed away the effects of the
tequila like a cold shower. Zoey sat up straighter and set the
glass down without a problem.

If a friend had challenged her like that ten
years ago, she’d have stood, walked out the door and never looked
back. The friendship would have been over. As a kid, she’d never
let anyone close enough to either ask such personal questions or to
know so many intimate details about her private life.

But the friendships she’d made in the Dinner
Club were different from the ones she’d known growing up. If Zoey
tried to walk away now, Fiona would stop her. She’d force her to
face the tough questions—while pillowing her in a cloud of loyal
support.

Zoey was still bamboozled that she belonged
to such a close group of friends.

“
Is that what’s going on?”
Fiona pressed.

While the question itself was a shitty one
to tackle, the answer was simple. “Do you not know my husband at
all?”

“
I used to know him really
well. But I haven’t seen him for more than a couple of days here
and there over the last two years.” She shrugged. “People
change.”

Things might be messed up between her and
her husband, maybe even unsalvageable, but Zoey knew with absolute
certainty there was no one else. “Theo’s no saint, but neither is
he deceitful. He wouldn’t cheat on me.
If
he’d met someone,
or even considered being with another woman, he’d tell me.”

One thing they still had between them was
honesty. It might be blunt, hurtful and used more as a weapon than
anything else, but it was still there.

She needed another drink. Something to bring
back the blissful nothingness. “Is the jug empty?”

“
Not yet.” Fiona topped up
her glass. “Are
you
having an affair?”

“
Me?” An unfeminine snort
erupted from Zoey. “What makes you think I could summon up the
desire to sleep with another man when I can’t pluck up the energy
or interest to sleep with my own husband? And, as you may have said
a time or two, he happens to be the sexiest man in Australia.” She
lifted her hand to count down several details on her fingers. “He
also has the best cock, most talented tongue and finest hand moves
ever. Not to mention the undisputed fact that angels taught him to
kiss.”

Truth was, when Theo wasn’t being an
asshole, he was hot as hell.

Hotter.

“
Which makes my question
even more perplexing. Your husband is gorgeous and sexy. And jeez,
Zo, about one of the best men I know. He worships you, yet your
marriage is still shaky. If the most solid couple around is having
trouble, something pretty massive must have happened.” Fiona stared
at her intently. “One of you having an affair is pretty damn
massive.”

“
Our marriage
is
shaky.” More like heading into earthquake territory than shaky.
“But neither of us has been unfaithful. I promise.”

Fiona frowned. “Relationships don’t just
fall apart. Something had to precipitate the breakdown.”

“
Something did.” Zoey
frowned at her glass. The alcohol she’d gulped down now bubbled
ominously in her belly. “We stopped talking to each
other.”

“
Care to
elaborate?”

“
I got too caught up in my
work.” She was getting good at telling half-truths.

“
How caught up is too
caught up? You’re a career-oriented woman. Theo knew that going
in.”

“
Yeah. And he’s a
career-oriented man, so it shouldn’t have made a difference.” There
was a time when their long office hours served only to sweeten the
hours spent together. In an absence-making-the-heart-grow-fonder
kind of a way. “But it did.”

“
How?”

Good question. One Zoey had been grappling
with for weeks. “Well, initially we never saw each other, for one.
He’d be asleep when I left in the morning, and I’d…” It was on the
tip of her tongue to say she’d already fallen asleep when he came
to bed, but that wasn’t true. More often than not she pretended to
sleep to avoid him. “And I was too wiped by the time he came to bed
to make any effort.”

Even when he was home, Theo often stayed up
late, liking to be on the net when Wall Street opened.

“
You were wiped out by
your Well Women clinic?”

Zoey nodded. “Yeah. It’s really taken off.
We’ve been so busy, even now I hardly have time for a coffee when
I’m at the rooms.” She’d only been able to get away now because
Katie had promised to look after the clinic and her patients while
she was gone.

A keen and personal interest in hormonal
imbalances in women had inspired Zoey to open the clinic. As a
teenager, she’d suffered from horrendous premenstrual symptoms. Her
lack of a relationship with her mother meant she’d had no one to
turn to about it, and her symptoms, both physical and emotional,
had continued untreated for years. When she’d gone on the pill at
eighteen, her life had changed forever.

Zoey vowed then that if she could help a
woman sort out her hormonal issues, she would. It was her primary
motivation for doing medicine. She never wanted anyone else to live
through the emotional ups and downs she’d endured.

“
We’ve gotten so many new
patients over the last three months, we have to move to bigger
rooms.”

“
And Theo doesn’t
approve?”

Theo didn’t even know they were moving. Zoey
rolled her shoulders, trying to loosen the muscles. “It’s not that
he doesn’t approve.”

“
Then what?”

“
He just got used to me
being too busy to talk to, I guess. So he stopped trying. And once
he stopped trying, I started getting upset because he never spoke
to me anymore.”

Fiona shot her a sardonic look.

Oh yeah, Fi wasn’t scared to call Zoey out
on her shortcomings. Which was exactly why Zoey was with her. She
didn’t need mollycoddling. She needed a friend to pour her drinks,
get her drunk and help her focus on the disaster that was her
marriage.

She gave Fiona a guilty smile. “I know. It
sounds stupid. It was my fault to begin with, and then I blamed
him. But it all kind of unraveled from there. Instead of telling
him I was upset, I started snapping. And you know Theo. He’s no
sap. If I yell at him, he’ll yell right back. Then we’d get even
more irritated with each other and start fighting.”

Fiona looked unconvinced. “You and Theo have
had a million fights. You’ve always bounced back.”

“
Yeah, we have.” They
usually bounced back naked and sweaty from great make-up sex.
Sometimes Zoey would deliberately pick a fight just so they could
have great make-up sex. “But this is different. Those were one-off,
in-your-face issues that exploded, so we had to tackle them then
and there. This crept up on us so slowly and so insidiously, I
didn’t even notice it was happening.” She’d been too absorbed in
herself and in work. “And once I did realize, it had already become
a regular pattern of behavior.” She stared beseechingly at Fiona,
pleading with her to understand something Zoey couldn’t really
understand herself. “I don’t know how to stop it now, Fi. I don’t
know how to break the pattern.”

The pain hit then, so intense Zoey wrapped
her arms around her belly and rocked. Her throat closed and her
ribs tightened until she feared they’d squeeze the very air from
her lungs.

She and Theo were falling apart. Their
marriage was breaking up. They were on a one-way rollercoaster
ride, hurtling downhill toward destruction.

Zoey didn’t think she’d survive the
devastation.

“
Talking it out would have
been a good way to start,” Fiona said softly.

It took a while to answer, to swallow down
the grief and find her voice again. “It might have been, if I’d
picked the right times to talk. But I didn’t.” God, she hadn’t even
had the capacity to talk to him decently. “I’d go to him, cranky
from him snapping at me and me snapping at him and wishing we could
be okay again. But instead of saying ‘let’s stop fighting, let’s
work this out’, I’d snap again. In-instead of apologizing for my
appalling behavior, I’d make more vicious accusations.” To which
Theo made counter-retorts, and inevitably, the nasty comments
became malicious arguments where things were said that should never
have been said.

“
Sounds like you’re both
trapped in a vicious cycle.”

Zoey nodded. “I…I don’t know how to stop it.
Things just keep getting worse and worse.” Her throat felt rough,
as though the grief were rubbing it raw from the inside. “I want to
find a solution, so badly, but…but there isn’t one. I had to leave
him. Had to come here, or…” Christ, she didn’t want to say it.

“
Or?” Fiona
prodded.

“
Or w-watch our marriage
implode forever.”

Fiona was quiet for a good long time. She
stared at Zoey with concerned eyes, her mouth pursed. “You know
what, Zo?” she asked finally.

Too exhausted and too miserable to answer,
Zoey shook her head.

“
I call
bullshit.”

Zoey blinked in surprise.

“
Yeah, hon. I call
bullshit. There is not a chance in hell there’s no solution to your
problems. You and Theo were born to be together. You knew it the
second you clamped eyes on him.” She pointed to her forearm. “I
still have the marks your nails left in my skin when you asked me
who he was. You clutched my arm so hard, you almost drew
blood.”

“
He rocked my world,” Zoey
whispered. She’d never experienced anything like it. The instant
she’d seen him, something had changed, like a tectonic plate
shifting—creating a new continent in the process.

She’d taken one look and her life had never
been the same.

“
Love like that doesn’t
fizzle. It doesn’t disappear because you’re facing hard times. You
fight for love like that.” Fiona smacked a fist on the table. “You
do whatever you can to find answers to your problems. You don’t
turn your back and run away. You just don’t.”

“
God, Fi.” The despair in
Zoey’s tone was audible. “This has been going on for months. If
there was an answer, don’t you think we’d have found it by
now?”

“
I don’t know.” Fiona
scowled at her. “Have you looked? Have you tried to find
one?”

Zoey froze.

“
Have you?” Fiona
demanded.

Jesus.

“
You haven’t.” Her friend
gaped at her, eyes filled with horror, fury and
disbelief.

Mortification crept into Zoey’s chest. She
scrambled to recall a time she’d extended an olive branch to her
husband.

Oh God.

Zoey hadn’t extended that olive branch.
Ever. She hadn’t tried to make up with Theo, and she hadn’t
apologized. Not once in the two months they’d been fighting.

What the hell kind of wife acted so coldly?
What woman in her right mind did that? Fought continuously for
weeks and weeks on end—and never tried to make amends?

A terrible, horrible, disgraceful wife,
that’s what kind. She’d failed Theo on a fundamental level. Instead
of making an effort to stop the squabbling, she’d let it overwhelm
her. She’d allowed the fighting to increase and proliferate until
it had crushed them both.

“
What the fuckety fuck?”
Fiona shook her head fiercely. “You have got to be shitting
me.”

“
It’s hard to fix a
marriage when your husband never talks to you,” Zoey shot at
her—then immediately regretted it. Blaming Theo and getting
defensive wouldn’t help matters. In fact, wasn’t that exactly what
had made the issues so complicated in the first place?

“
Yeah?” Fiona raised an
eyebrow. “I bet it’s just as hard for your husband to talk when his
wife makes no effort.”

Zoey flinched, more from the truth than from
the accusatory tone. “Why not just shove a knife in my chest while
I’m down?” And
still
she couldn’t drop her defenses. Why the
hell not?

“
Do you want me to
sugarcoat the truth? Want me to pretend you’re innocent here? That
all your problems are Theo’s fault, and not yours? Will that help?
Will it make you feel better?”

Heaviness seeped into her chest, making her
heart fight to beat evenly. Breathing was almost impossible.
Difficult as it was, she forced her defenses down. “I know…” Zoey
struggled to find enough air to talk. Jeez, it would be so much
easier to leave. Run away rather than face the fire. But if she
tried, Fiona would only come after her.

“
I know I’ve screwed up,”
she said hoarsely, forcing the words out. “My marriage unraveled
because
I
let it happen.” She began to shake. “Instead of
fighting to get our relationship back on track, I pulled away. I
fought against my husband.” Her eyes filled with frustrated,
distraught tears. “But…but, God help me, I don’t know how to fix
it.” Shit, she was a helpless, hopeless wimp. “I don’t know how to
approach Theo now, or…or what to say if I did.”