The Things We Need to Say: An emotional, uplifting story of hope from bestselling author Rachel Burton

‘I don’t think anything will ever appease this guilt,’ he replies quietly. ‘But I have to do it for our marriage.’ He pauses for a moment. ‘For everything we’ve been through.’

Karen looks at him then, a flash of understanding crossing her face.

‘I can’t imagine how it feels,’ she says. ‘What it must be like to go through that.’

‘I hope you never have to.’

‘What if she leaves?’

‘I don’t know what will happen,’ Will says. ‘But I do know that I have to be honest with her. She’s my wife.’

He feels as though Karen wants to say more, as though she wants to reach out and touch him one last time, but he is already backing away down the path. He raises a hand as he shuts the gate behind him and starts running back up the hill towards his house, his wife, his life.

He wonders how much longer this will be his life.

Fran (#ulink_92dc335a-e379-58c8-98e2-63b5fa0a74bf)

She is still sitting at the bottom of the bed as he comes into the bedroom.

‘There you are,’ he says, his running shoes in one hand, wiping the sweat from his brow with the other. ‘What are you doing up here?’

‘Just finishing packing,’ Fran replies, trying to smile. She doesn’t know how she is going to do this.

‘Are you OK?’ he asks. She sees the tension in his jaw and knows instinctively that he has a headache and is pretending he doesn’t.

She nods. ‘Just a bit nervous about tomorrow.’ Why is she doing this? Why doesn’t she just come out and ask him?

He walks over to her, bends down, kisses her forehead.

‘You’re going to be just fine,’ he says. ‘I promise.’

Am I, Will? Am I? she thinks.

‘I’m just going to grab a quick shower and then I’ll start dinner – OK?’

She nods again, watching as he lifts her suitcase off the bed and puts it in the corner of the room. She watches as he picks his phone up off the nightstand, unlocks it, and frowns as he checks his messages. He strips off his sweaty clothes and leaves them in a pile on the floor, disappearing into the en-suite. Usually she’d pick them up, put them in the laundry basket. Today she leaves them where they are.

She waits, listening to the water running, the sound of her husband singing softly to himself. She feels a wave of nausea wash through her. She tries to stand up, but she feels as though she is going to faint.

She waits.

Eventually Will comes out of the shower, still humming to himself, his hair damp, the towel wrapped loosely around his waist. He looks so beautiful: her incredible, handsome husband. The man who saved her from her own loneliness all those years ago and taught her how to live again.

But suddenly he isn’t hers any more. Someone else has touched his skin, run their fingers through his hair, felt him against them, inside them. Fran has to blink back tears to stop him seeing how upset she is. He sees her looking at him and comes over to her, sitting on the bed next to her.

‘I love you,’ he says. The smell of his aftershave sends another wave of sadness through her. She doesn’t reply. She doesn’t know what to say.

‘It’s OK to start getting on with our lives, you know,’ he says gently. ‘You don’t have to feel guilty because you’re trying to move on.’

When she doesn’t reply he stands up again and walks over to his closet to get dressed. She watches as he drops his towel, leaving it in a puddle on the floor next to his running things, and slides on his clothes. She wonders what he’s thinking.

‘Are you having an affair with Karen Barden?’ She hears the words as though somebody else has spoken them.

He turns around and she sees a shadow cross his face, and for a second she thinks he’s going to deny it. Then she watches him crumple, leaning back against the wall.

‘How did you find out?’

‘So you are having an affair?’ She realises she’d been hoping he would deny it, or that it had been a misunderstanding – a crush or obsession on Karen’s part. She realises that she wasn’t prepared for it to be true. Her world, the one that had already tipped on its axis, flips over completely.

‘Was,’ Will replies. ‘Past tense.’ As though that makes a difference. He makes it sound so matter-of-fact. She searches his face for some indication of what he’s feeling but he isn’t giving her anything.

‘She sent you a text this afternoon though. I don’t know why I read it, I just …’ Fran stops, biting her lip. Will has the decency not to question why she was going through his phone. She couldn’t have answered him even if he had asked.

He moves towards her then, wiping his hand down his face. She hears the sound of the palm of his hand against the stubble on his jaw.

‘God, Fran, I’m so sorry. It’s been over for months, since before Christmas. I promise you that.’

‘When did it start?’

He sighs. ‘Halloween,’ he says. ‘The night I walked out.’

‘The night you …’ She doesn’t finish the sentence, can’t bring herself to remember what he did before he walked out on her. She turns away from him, remembering the argument they’d had that night, how Will had told her he couldn’t take it any more, remembering the sound of the door slamming behind him as he left.

‘I didn’t plan to go there,’ he says. ‘I just ended up there.’

‘I didn’t even know you knew her.’

‘I didn’t really. We bumped into each other a few times when you were still really ill. She was just someone to talk to …’ He trails off, realising the hole he’s digging himself into. Realising there is no way out of this.

‘Jesus, Will,’ she says quietly.

‘It only lasted a few weeks,’ he says, as though that makes a difference. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing …’

‘So why is she texting you now?’ Fran interrupts.

He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. I saw her in the pub last night. I hadn’t seen her for months.’

‘I don’t think you’re in a position to get defensive,’ Fran replies. It seems almost impossible to think how she and Will had been together only that morning, the tenderness, the love.

Her husband had cheated on her. After everything they’d been through. She feels numb, as though her body is shutting down on her again just as it did after her mother died, just as it did last summer.

She lies down on the bed, rolling onto her side, her back towards him.

He walks around the bed and kneels down next to her. He takes her hand in his and says her name softly, gently. She doesn’t resist him; she has never known how to resist him.

Seeing Will kneeling by the bed like that reminds her of when she was pregnant. He would squat down next to her as she settled down to sleep each night and he would talk to her bump. He’d recite nursery rhymes, sing songs, tell him stories about his family, teach him the rules of cricket. He was so delighted that he was finally going to be a father, so delighted that it was a boy. He pretended that it would have been the same if it had been a girl, but Fran had never really believed that.

Those moments were some of the happiest of Fran’s life. When Will was there with her, when it was just the three of them shut up together in the bedroom each evening, she could forget about the pain in her back, the strange sensation of her stomach stretching taut across her like a drum skin, the weight of her breasts. She could forget about how being pregnant didn’t seem to suit her, how she felt as though her organs were being pushed up and out of her throat, how she didn’t feel big enough, substantial enough, to be carrying Will’s son. When Will pressed his lips to her stomach she could forget about how scared she was to be pregnant.