His Other Woman

by Louise Voss

Genres: Family Life; Literary Fiction; Small Town & Rural; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

When my husband vanished, I could never have imagined that finding him again would be worse than losing him… Not long before before our daughter’s wedding, my husband plans a trip away. I encourage him to go: I know he needs a break. I drive him to the airport, wrap my arms around him and kiss him goodbye, telling him I’ll see him soon. Then he vanishes. And no one believes me when I say he would never have left us, not so cruelly, leaving our messages unread and our calls ignored. I spend weeks in our empty house, surrounded by pictures of our family, desperately searching for answers. I go shopping with my daughter for her wedding dress, hoping beyond hope that he will come home in time to walk her down the aisle. But when we find him, he doesn’t remember us – and he has done something I may never be able to forgive. I just want my husband back… but is he still the man I married? From the bestselling author Louise Voss comes an unputdownable story about family and forgiveness, that will take you on an emotional rollercoaster from start to finish. Perfect for fans of Nicole Trope, Kerry Fisher and The Silent Daughter. Why everyone is talking about Louise Voss: ‘Utterly believable… Highly emotional… A complete tear-jerker. ’ Heat ‘Made me cry… Read it! I read it in one go… Get your tissues ready! ’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘ I love it more and more each time… It's like opening a gift and finding it has lots of different parts… LOVED IT.’ Goodreads reviewer ‘Probably my favourite book ever!’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘ I laughed, I cried, and lost a lot of sleep… Loved it.’ Goodreads reviewer ‘I thoroughly, utterly and completely loved this book.’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

‘Emotional and uplifting… Compelling page-turner… Couldn’t put this book down. ’ Goodreads reviewer ‘I got really wrapped up in this and was in floods of tears.’ Goodreads reviewer ‘A real emotional rollercoaster of a read!’ Goodreads reviewer, ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Release date: July 2, 2021

Publisher: Bookouture

Print pages: 350

Sample

Despite the early flight, the kids had all stayed over so they could come and see their dad off at Gatwick. They were bleary-eyed and hungover in the back of the people carrier, after way too much wine at the leaving dinner Alanda had cooked the night before. Now they clustered around him, yawning, as Liam transferred a few travel toiletries into a clear plastic bag ready for the security inspections.

Alanda was rooting through the smaller of Liam’s two backpacks, the light foldable one he was using as hand luggage: ‘Oh Liam! You can’t take that through.’ She pulled out a bottle of Diet Coke and handed it to Becky.

‘Brilliant. Thanks!’ she said, guffawing, as she screwed off the cap. It fizzed loudly and spewed brown liquid for a moment before she got her mouth around the top.

‘Oops,’ said Liam. ‘Forgot you have to buy your drinks on the other side. That’s how long it’s been since I last flew. Amateur mistake.’

‘Anything else in there you can’t take through? Happy to relieve you of any expensive aftershave,’ Jake asked hopefully, as Alanda continued to search.

‘Nice try, son. Even if I had brought expensive aftershave, you wouldn’t get to keep it. I’m only going for three weeks, not three years.’

‘Did you see that YouTube video of the man farting in the x-ray machine? You know, the one you have to stand like this in?’

Becky assumed a stance, legs apart and arms held up at right angles. ‘It’s so funny, it comes out in this little white cloud on the video.’

Liam laughed. Since childhood, Becky had always found anything fart-related utterly hilarious, particularly on the occasions when it concerned her twin brother. Alanda and Liam privately found it endearingly amusing.

‘I’ll make sure I don’t embarrass myself,’ he said, hugging her, as Heather rolled her eyes.

‘Gosh, I’m going to miss you all,’ he added, gazing at his family. Heather started twisting her engagement ring round her finger and looking anxious.

‘Dad,’ she began, but Liam already knew what she was going to say.

‘Of course I’ll be back in time! Wild horses wouldn’t keep me away from walking you up the aisle.’

Still holding Becky with one arm, Liam put his other one around his youngest daughter’s plump shoulder. She didn’t look mollified though.

To be honest, Alanda thought, she didn’t blame Heather for being worried. She would never admit it to the kids but she had butterflies flapping blindly in her belly at the thought of Liam being away for this long. It wasn’t panic – she was a grown, independent woman. Worrying about surviving for a few weeks without her other half; how pathetic would that be? But she did feel concerned.

Whilst they’d never been apart for anything like as long as this, it wasn’t herself she was concerned for; it was Liam. The fact that they had both acknowledged the need for him to get away and have some time on his own was a worrying indication of his current state of mind.

She knew she would miss him horribly, but it was more than just that. The ‘what-ifs’ were already waking her up at night, her eyes flying open in a midnight panic. When she could make out Liam’s hump of a silhouette next to her, the pounding of her heart would settle a little and she would stretch out a foot to connect her toe with his shin, or a hand to lightly touch his back. The thought of him not being there at all, being thousands of miles away, made her want to hyperventilate with anxiety for his safety. Their catchphrase, even when one of them popped out to Tesco Metro for a pint of milk, was ‘Don’t get lost or killed!’

As if reading Alanda’s mind, Heather chimed in with a what-if of her own: ‘Yeah, but, Dad, what if you decided to extend your trip and come back, like, the week before the wedding, and then there was an airline strike or something, and you couldn’t get back?’

Heather had always been the worrier of the three of them. Jake and Becky had each other to confide in, and poor Heather had seemed to spend her life anxiously fretting over problems that the twins blithely discarded. Liam and Alanda hoped that getting married to stable, calm Kevin would give her the security she had somehow never felt within the family.

Becky was a little put out that her younger sister would be the first of the three of them up the aisle, but Heather had always been far more mature than the flighty Becky.

‘The wedding’s almost three months away. Anyway, I promise I won’t extend my trip.’

‘What if you fall off the path on the Camino and break your back and nobody finds you?’

‘Heather, I’m not going mountain climbing! It’s mostly pretty flat, and there will be tons of other people walking too. And the Madrid route is the easiest. There’s no way I wouldn’t be found if anything did happen. I’ll have my phone.’

‘Dad, make sure you WhatsApp us when you land?’ Jake’s face had turned serious.

‘Of course! Guys, will you please stop fussing? I’ll be fine.’

Alanda sidled over to him and wrapped her arms around his waist, exaggeratedly pushing away their two daughters. ‘Have an amazing adventure, my angel,’ she said into his ear. ‘I’ll miss you too.’

‘Come with me,’ he said, only half-jokingly. ‘I’ve changed my mind, I don’t need to “find myself”, not when I’ve got you lot.’

‘Oh Dad, don’t be daft, everyone knows you can only have a midlife crisis on your own.’ Jake grinned, but Alanda spotted the sneaky punch on the bicep that Becky gave her twin. Still too raw for them to joke about, then.

‘Me, walk three hundred kilometres? You must be kidding. We’re just not used to being without you, that’s all.’

Alanda kissed his cheek, and he put his hand up to cup the back of her head. As happened more and more frequently, she felt faintly self-conscious. Her hair used to be so soft and silky but since she hit fifty it was so much coarser; decades of hair dye taking their toll. Not that Liam would probably notice the change – thankfully he wasn’t the most observant of men – but she missed her bright gold natural colour. These days it was streaked with grey, her hands freckled with liver spots like her grandmother’s. Age had sneaked up on them both.

‘Nor I you. But hopefully it’ll do the trick and I’ll come back a new man. Right, Madrid is calling. I love you all. Stay safe. Keep in touch and I will too.’ He hugged the three kids one by one. ‘Jake, let me know what’s happening with the job hunt. Bex, good luck with the internet dating, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Heather, keep me posted with wedding arrangements, won’t you?’

Then he kissed Alanda, long and hard, invoking puking noises from Becky and ‘get a room’ from Jake. Heather looked like she was trying not to cry, and when he broke off from the kiss, he spotted tears in Alanda’s eyes.

‘For God’s sake, everyone, it’s only a few weeks!’ But Alanda could see how touched he was, at how much they all loved him.

‘Don’t get lost or killed!’ she called after his retreating back. He turned, and her last image of him was his wide, loving smile before he vanished, waving, through the door to Departures.

Once through the security scanners, Liam gathered his possessions from their various trays and followed the crowd into Duty Free, wandering aimlessly through racks of astronomically expensive perfumes with no intention of buying anything. He caught a glimpse of his reflection in a mirror behind a display of aftershave and thought, blimey, is this baggy-eyed man really me?

He was neither particularly vain nor insecure about his appearance – never had to be, he thought, eyeing the six-packed, chisel-jawed model on a box of aftershave. He had always had Alanda complimenting him on his body, his looks, long after compliments were objectively warranted. It had been many years since anything like a six-pack rippled the front of his torso, and yet somehow Alanda still seemed to fancy him. Maybe she just had the memory of him when they first met permanently imprinted on her psyche, the way he had of her.

A sense remained of the imprint of her lips on his, the texture of her soft hair on his fingers, her scent. She still looked incredible, he thought with pride, and a residual sense of astonishment that she had stuck with him all these years. Other women in their early fifties had thickening waists and thinning hair, jowly smiles and yellowing teeth – not Alanda. She still turned heads, whether in a bikini on the beach or matching him pint for pint in the pub.

How fortunate he was, he thought. The luckiest, to have such a supportive wife. It was all very well, being lovey-dovey when life was easy, but she had been by his side through thick and thin, and things had been very thin indeed in the past few months. He saw his mother’s confused face as he left her in the residential home; heard her reedy voice plaintively calling, ‘Wait, Richard, I don’t like it here, I want to go home!’

Had it been mean of him not to correct her, to let her think that it was his twin brother who had been the one to wrench her from her home and move her to that strange place?

It hadn’t been mean. Richard had only been dead two weeks at that point, and the more he could spare their mother the sort of grief he was feeling himself, the better. He shuddered, briefly imagined trying to explain to her that he had found Richard’s body hanging from a beam in his attic apartment, his lifeless eyes seeming to stare accusingly at him. No, it had been the one time when her dementia was a blessing rather than a curse.

Perhaps it was the immediate aftermath of being separated from his family, or the maudlin turn of his thoughts, but suddenly Liam no longer felt so lucky. As he emerged into the main Departures area, he made his way to the nearest free moulded-plastic seat and collapsed onto it. He missed Richard with a pain visceral in its intensity, even though they hadn’t seen eye to eye for some years – a stupid falling out when Richard had accused Liam of dragging him over from America with their mother a decade ago, after their dad died, and then not helping him integrate, whilst allegedly ‘bending over backwards to take care of Mom’. This had rankled with Liam and Alanda. They hadn’t ‘dragged’ him; they’d encouraged him, after his life in the States had been so derailed by alcohol and drugs. At the time it had seemed like such a neat solution – to bring him and Violet over while Vi was still fit enough to live independently. She had been the one they’d worried about most, but in the event, it was Rich who was the problem.

Vi had adapted immediately, loving the proximity to her teenage grandkids, embracing the Women’s Institute and the University of the Third Age, theatre-going groups and community choirs, even the odd date here and there… She adored her tiny house in the over-sixties sheltered accommodation complex, a honey-stone converted mews – but Rich had been furious that Liam hadn’t found her somewhere where he could have moved in too.

Liam and Alanda felt they’d done all they could for him, finding and part-funding a flat for him in Basingstoke – near, but not too near, at his request – helping him get a job in a local supermarket, encouraging him to go to local AA or NA meetings, but Rich had obviously thought the only acceptable solution was for him to move in with them, and at the time it had been impossible. All the kids still lived at home then and they only had four bedrooms.

Relations thawed considerably over the years, and Rich seemed to have settled a bit more. He spent every Christmas with them all, and he and Liam went out for the occasional pint (when Rich wasn’t in AA – which he dipped in and out of, as though it was a private members’ club that he occasionally graced with his presence). Yet the twins never regained the easy closeness they’d had as children and teenagers, up to the point when Liam had first departed for England on his travels. But whereas Liam had built a life, a lovely life, Rich seemed consumed with bitterness and a sense of failure that he didn’t have what Liam did. Rich had never married or had a successful relationship – except with coke and booze – and eventually decided that there was no point to life anymore.

His suicide last year left Liam racked with guilt, on top of the terrible shock of loss. He should never have encouraged those pints when he knew Rich had a problem, or let pass the obvious lies and fantasies about how well his twin’s life was going. Since Rich’s death, Liam had not been able to shake a conviction that he could have saved him, no matter how many times Alanda had tried to persuade him otherwise.

‘Oh Rich,’ he muttered. ‘Wish we were going walking together, mate.’

The woman in the seat next to him looked up from her magazine and hastily moved to another area, the rumble of her suitcase’s wheels sounding as alarmed as she looked.

Liam sighed. He felt thoroughly depressed that his chief emotions still seemed to be grief and exhaustion, not the energising excitement he thought he’d feel at the prospect of all the walking ahead of him.

How could he be tired already? He’d not even started yet! He wondered if it was the thought of the same trudge every day, meeting strangers – not something he relished at the best of times, now that he thought about it – miles and miles of one foot in front of the other, topped off by sleeping in a different bed every night, sometimes even on a bunk in a huge dormitory with more strangers…

He’d rather be back at work, losing himself in a complex garden design or up a ladder with a hedge-trimmer.

He’d only agreed because Alanda had been so enthusiastic and he wanted to please her, wanted her to think that he was OK, that this would help. And Alanda, always with everyone else’s best interests at heart, had a way about her that swept everyone up in her wake before they even realised. How had he not noticed what was happening here? She’d chivvied and encouraged, jollied along and cajoled until even he thought it was a good idea.

‘Didn’t you say you’d always fancied doing it? Well, now you can!’ Alanda had said triumphantly, as if that settled the matter.

Perhaps it was a good idea. He had thought it was a good idea, once, when he was younger and fitter; in fact, it was the original reason why he had come to Europe in the first place all those years ago. He’d flown over from Wisconsin straight after graduating high school, to spend a week staying in YMCAs and connecting with his British roots (both his parents were English and had settled in the States when he was a baby), and then the intention had been to make the same journey he was about to undertake now, thirty-four years later, to walk the Camino de Santiago.

But on a visit to Stonehenge and Salisbury cathedral, on the third day of his travels, he’d met Alanda and never left. She had been his waitress in the tea shop he’d stopped in for lunch, in a tiny tight black skirt and short, frilly white apron, a biro stuck in her blonde ponytail, and the biggest grey eyes and longest legs he’d ever seen.

It was love at first sight and all thoughts of the pilgrimage were chucked into the long grass of courtship and raging testosterone, followed swiftly by getting a job as a landscape gardener’s apprentice, finding a flat together, marriage, kids, building his business, relocating Vi and Rich after his dad died ten years ago… He’d never thought about it before, but suddenly it seemed to him as though he had been frantically scampering around a gigantic hamster wheel for the last three decades.

So, it did make sense to do it now. It was meant to be a pilgrimage; a walk to help him come to terms with the grief and guilt of not being able to help Rich. Fresh air, big skies, home-cooking in little tavernas along the way. A proper chance to clear his head.

Yet somehow the thought of it made his heart sink. He sat back in the hard plastic chair and sighed heavily.

Movement, a flash of white in his peripheral vision, made him turn his head. It was one of those digital advertising screens next to a kiosk selling sunglasses, showing a video of someone skiing down a diamond-bright mountain against a vivid blue sky. The skier swooped fast and accurately, skis cutting through the powder, churning it up behind him in a shower of glittering snow.

Liam watched, transfixed. His heart began to beat faster as adrenaline shot through his veins at the thought of doing that. He hadn’t skied since he was at school, but it was like riding a bike, surely? A day on nursery slopes and it would all come back to him. He could almost feel the biting cold air in his lungs and hear the clean slice of the skis’ edges in the snow.

But he wasn’t going skiing. Instead, he was going to plod along footpaths for the best part of three hundred kilometres and twenty-three days, with little to distract him but his grief. He’d had one big chance to do whatever he wanted, go wherever he fancied, and now he was doing something he felt reluctant about, just because his wife had told him he wanted to, swept along on a tide of second-hand enthusiasm. What kind of a wimp was he?

The skiing video was on a loop, advertising a resort called Les Portes du Soleil, and Liam sat for at least fifteen minutes, watching it over and over again. Les Portes du Soleil – the doors to the sun? The doors of the sun? Either way, it sounded wonderful. He googled it and discovered that it wasn’t one resort, but a large mountainous area near Geneva with at least twelve ski resorts, partly in France and partly Switzerland.

Then he got up and headed for Gate 49 where, the departures board informed him, his flight to Madrid was now boarding. As he walked along the travelator, his feet bouncing on the rubber surface, he imagined he was whizzing down a cold, sunny slope instead. Was early April too late in the season to ski?

Once on the plane, his forearms making unwanted contact with the people on either side of him, Liam found he still couldn’t shake the image of that digital skier flying down the mountain. That was an escape, an adventure, something to blow away the misery! Why hadn’t that idea occurred to him first, darn it? The more he thought about it, the more he felt that all walking would achieve would be to imprint his losses further with every step; the opposite effect to the intended one.

Yet he couldn’t not walk the Camino de Santiago. It was all arranged. What would Alanda say? He felt a stab of frustration. If she’d only come with him, it would be a different story. He wouldn’t be setting off for his very own forty – well, twenty-three – days and nights in the wilderness, but instead a simple walking holiday with his beloved. It sounded a lot more appealing – but of course Alanda couldn’t come with him. She had the wedding prep to help Heather with, the shop to run, and someone had to visit his mother now that neither he nor Richard could. He closed his eyes, trying to block out an interminable announcement over the tannoy listing the entire contents of the duty-free trolley, with prices.

What do you think, Rich? Walking or skiing?

Alanda and the kids were always teasing him for being so safe and predictable. What if he did something totally spontaneous, something he really wanted to do?

In his head, his brother was egging him on, as he always used to. Do it, bro! You know you want to.

He really did want to.

By the time they were instructed to stow their tray tables and make sure their seatbelts were fastened for the descent into Madrid airport, Liam had come to a decision, fidgeting with glee at the thought of it.

He was going to pick up his rucksack, and instead of heading off on the first 100km leg of the walk into the hills of Sierra de Guadarrama, he was going to buy the first available return flight to Geneva, or Zurich, whichever was nearer; preferably a ski holiday package of some sort. Three, maybe five days’ skiing, to scratch this particular itch, and then he’d get back on track, literally, and do the walk too. He’d built in a lot of a wiggle room with the timings at the planning stage, intending to really take his time and have lots of days off to rest and explore the towns and villages he walked through, so he could just trim those out and use them all at the start for his skiing days instead. It would make for a more challenging walk later, but it would be worth it, and he was pretty sure he could still cover the distance.

Money wasn’t an issue – he was about to inherit most of Richard’s estate once probate was done. It wouldn’t be a huge amount, just the proceeds of the sale of his one-bed flat in Basingstoke, but it would cover this extra outlay, plus the cost of Heather’s wedding, and a good few months of Mum’s care home fees.

This could be Richard’s gift to him; the gift of spontaneity, freedom, the excitement that the Camino de Santiago wasn’t offering.

And what was more, he wasn’t going to tell Alanda, not until he had arrived in Geneva. She would only try and talk him out of it and he couldn’t risk that, not now that he was feeling such a rush.

It felt like the most thrilling, reckless thing he had ever done.

As soon as he had picked up his rucksack – which already felt as though it was full of rocks – and got through Customs at Madrid, Liam switched on his phone and WhatsApp’d the family group chat Jake had set up. Landed! Flight was fine. Thanks again for getting up early to see me off. Will send pics as soon as there’s something interesting to show you… Love you all, and snogs to Mum (that’s just to embarrass you, Bex) xxx

He found a spare high stool at a Formica counter in a coffee concession near the various airline kiosks and started googling, a large espresso in hand and a still-rising sense of excitement as the results scrolled up.

After ten minutes he had favourited a beautiful Airbnb apartment right near the nursery slopes in a resort called Les Gets and found an intermediate ski package including lift passes, airport transfers and all the gear for a week, starting either today, or tomorrow if it was too tight to get everything sorted. But it felt imperative to his plan to be standing at the top of a ski run by the end of today if at all possible, partly because otherwise he wouldn’t have enough time to get the walk done too.

Fortunately, he hadn’t had to pre-book accommodation along the Camino route, apparently you just turned up and there would be a bed for you somewhere, even if it ended up being in a municipal albergue, a dormitory full of other walkers, so there was nothing to rearrange there.

That left the flight. The whole plan would come to nothing if there were no available flights – and it had to be the place he’d seen on the billboard and no other. With his pulse pounding in his throat, he approached the airline kiosks, brand new credit card (acquired for his travel expenses) in hand.

In the event it could not have been simpler, as if it was all meant to be. The first desk he enquired at not only had a return flight direct to Geneva, but it was leaving in just enough time for him to comfortably get back through check-in and Security. He’d be there by early afternoon and, providing he could get kitted out without too much hassle, could conceivably do a quick introductory run before it got dark.

He couldn’t wait to send Alanda and the kids a WhatsApp of him on the slopes, gleefully thinking that never again would there be any accusations of ‘boring’ or ‘predictable’ levelled in his direction. It would blow their minds.

On Friday morning, the first full day of Liam’s trip, Alanda woke up at five. Before even opening her eyes, she automatically rolled over to embrace him, as had been their ritual for over three decades. The shock of his absence on the other side of the bed hit her, in the cool sheets and silence of the still-dark bedroom, just as she’d always known it would. Before, though, it had never been anything to worry about – Liam’s insomnia meant she often awoke in an empty bed, and she would know he’d either be downstairs watching guitar technique videos on YouTube, or up in the attic trying to practice the techniques through headphones.

But this was the real thing. Now he wasn’t in either of those places. Now it finally, properly, sank in in that she would not see him, other than as pixels on a phone screen, for three long weeks. This is not a drill, she thought, rolling over and clutching her knees to her chest to stretch her lower back. It was always stiff first thing in the morning. She usually performed these stretches while Liam was making their first cup of tea. She’d laughed about it with him the night before he left, when he’d said he was going to have to buy her a Teasmade, because how on earth would she cope without a cup of tea in bed first thing?

‘Do they even still make Teasmades?’ she’d asked while thinking, actually, he had a point. One of the many things she loved about her husband was the fact that he automatically brought her up a cuppa in bed.

They had never been apart for this long before. She had been so focussed on trying to keep him out of the frightening mental abyss into which he seemed to be sliding, ever since his twin’s death and his mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis, that she had not stopped to consider her own feelings. Now all she could think was that this was a mistake. They should have gone somewhere together. A safari, or snorkelling in the Maldives, or driving round New Zealand in a camper van… How could she have thought that sending him off into an enforced exile was a good idea? It might well make him worse.

But she couldn’t have left Heather, not when the wedding date was fast approaching and there was still so much to be done.

She sat up in bed, reaching automatically for her mobile, but there were no further messages from him, neither on the family WhatsApp nor their private text conversation. She had texted him goodnight before she went to sleep, and he had not replied. Perhaps he was upset with her for sending him away?

Surely not. He had seemed up for it, grateful for her organisation – not excited, exactly, but more intrigued. Liam rarely showed actual excitement; all his emotions tended to be muted, soft-focus and understated, which often made it difficult to discern what he was really feeling. Although there had been no mistaking the slump he had been in for the past few months.

Morning darling, she texted. Dying to hear how it’s all going – did you get to the start of the trail OK? We need photos! Hope your phone’s not playing up again, that would be terrible timing – I knew I should’ve made you take the iPad as back-up… Nothing much on for me today. Julie’s in the shop all day so I don’t need to worry about that. Going for a swim, planning to make a bit more bunting for H, then might see if Sadie’s free for lunch. I’ll pop in to your mum later too. Love you loads Xxx

Liam’s phone had recently gone through a phase of randomly switching itself off and then being difficult to re-boot, but the issue had apparently been resolved by a software update – pe. . .