The Beach House by Jane Green Read Free Book Online

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    Her own husband, who had been cast as the devil during this, her first affair, now seemed to be exactly what she wanted. He was safety and security, he was friendship and trust. He was everything she knew she loved and wanted, and Richard, suddenly, was not.
    “I can’t do this,” Nancy said gently, a few weeks after Richard had moved out. “I can’t leave my husband.”
    “What are you saying?” Richard’s eyes widened in shock. He had blown his life apart for this woman and now she didn’t want him?
    Was she fucking kidding him?
    Nancy didn’t have answers. She just knew, categorically, that she couldn’t do this. She had started tiptoeing around her husband, terrified that Richard’s wife would contact him, let him know about the affair, find a way to ruin her marriage in revenge.
    A surge of anger swept through Richard, and he stormed out, slamming the door of his car in a fury.
    “I miss you,” he said to Daff that Friday when he came to the house to collect Jessica. “I miss us. ”
    He expected Daff’s eyes to soften, expected to see a chink in her armor, but there was none.
    “You should have thought of that before you embarked on an affair,” Daff hissed quietly, careful not to let Jessica hear.
    And despite the books she had read, despite knowing that an affair didn’t have to end the marriage, suddenly, for Daff it was over. Not because of the affair, but because of the choice he had made. The affair she could have forgiven, in time. She understood that marriages weren’t perfect, and that temptation exists, and that sometimes men—poor creatures—cannot help being driven by their libidos.
    But she couldn’t forgive him for leaving his wife and child for the object of his affair, especially when she knew that it wouldn’t last. And she had known it wouldn’t last, for she had seen Nancy, had found out about her, had parked outside her big colonial house and watched her pull up in her Range Rover, her husband arriving in his big 7 series BMW shortly afterward. She had known this was not someone who would leave this life for Richard.
    They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but Daff didn’t want revenge, she was far too sad for that. She felt sadness for their marriage, for what she thought she had, and what she so quickly realized was merely an illusion, sad for Jessica who thought she couldn’t be heard crying at night, although Daff heard every whimper.
    And she felt sad for Richard.
    Daff had always thought of Richard as so powerful, so capable, so strong, but in one fell swoop she had lost all respect for him, and those times when he would turn up on her doorstep in tears—which seemed so like crocodile tears that it was all she could do not to slap him around the face to snap him out of it— she saw him as pathetic.
    She saw him as a lost little boy, one who knew he had screwed up his life, torn it apart, and would try everything to get it back together again.
    At times he would turn up with anger: if Daff had been more this, if she had wanted more of that, if she hadn’t done this, said that . . .
    Daff would just stare at him in disbelief, calling Jessica and walking away, leaving him with his false accusations on the doorstep.
    He would phone later, always phoned later to apologize, to cry down the phone and tell her he couldn’t live without her, but Daff, who had always castigated herself for being so black and white about everything in her life, knew that her feelings would never change.
    The divorce was finalized three months ago. It could have got nasty, but Daff chose not to go down that road. They went to mediation and wrote their own agreement, Richard paying child support and a small amount of alimony. Not enough for Daff to survive on, something she had been frightened of since the beginning, when she had sat down and made a list of her options, but Richard, always the stronger of the two, refused to pay more, and at the time Daff didn’t have the strength