The Wrong Mother by Sophie Hannah

away a lot for work,’ he said. ‘Overnight. Often. One or two nights at a time, once or twice a month. This time it’s a week. And whenever I check into another hotel on my own and throw my overnight bag down on the bed, I think to myself, I don’t know what I want more—sleep or adventure. Should I order dinner in my room, watch telly in bed, get my head down early and wake up late, or should I go down to the hotel bar and try to pick up an exotic woman?’
    I laughed. ‘So tonight you opted for the latter.’ Though for him I could hardly have been exotic. I lived less than half an hour’s drive from his house. ‘Didn’t you say Lucy was five?’ I said. ‘She must be sleeping by now.’
    He looked miserable, as if he wished I hadn’t said that. ‘I can’t remember the last good night I had,’ he said. He seemed needy, yet at the same time strong and determined. Almost angry. I suppose I found him intriguing.
    ‘Shit,’ I said. ‘No one warned me it might get worse.’
    ‘It might.’ Unexpectedly, he grinned. ‘But it could also get better. For a bit. Say, this week. Couldn’t it?’
    I had never been unfaithful to my husband before. I never will again. I am not the unfaithful type. I hate the whole idea of infidelity. ‘You’re wasting your time,’ I told him.
    ‘You can’t, in all conscience, say no,’ he said. ‘I’d be too embarrassed. The only way you can save me from the fate of massive humiliation is by saying yes.’
    I knew I ought to be finding him more annoying by the second, but I was starting to like him. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t. I told you, I need to rest. Spending a week with another man—that’d be a big deal for me. It’d send me into panic mode, and I’d go home in a worse state than I was in when I left.’ Part of me couldn’t believe I was taking this seriously enough to give him such a considered response.
    ‘It could be this week only,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t have to keep in touch. We’re both happily married, neither of us wants to break up our family. We’ve both got a lot to lose. We’re parents—in other words, nobody expects us to do anything secret or exciting ever again.’
    He was right. My best friend, who was and still is single, was always telling me I was prim and proper, just because she occasionally saw me trying to persuade my children to eat broccoli, or changing the TV channel if someone was being hacked to pieces on the screen. She thought I’d become a boring mumsy type, and this idea enraged me. And I found this man—Mark Bretherick—physically attractive, especially when he promised that we could confine our adventurous activities, as he called them, to the daytime and early evening, so that I could still have my seven nights of unbroken sleep.
    We didn’t share a room. We never spent a night in the same bed. By ten thirty each evening, we were back in our separate suites. But we ate together, had massages together, sat in the outdoor hot tub and the hammam together—and obviously we did the obvious.
    One evening, in the restaurant, he started to cry. For no reason, it seemed. He burst out of there, embarrassed, and when he came back he asked me to forget it had happened. I worried he was starting to fall for me, having second thoughts about not keeping in touch once our week together was over, but he seemed all right again after that, so I stopped worrying.
    However terrible it sounds, I didn’t feel guilty. I thought about a book I’d read as a teenager, Flowers for Algernon . I don’t remember who wrote it, but it’s about a retarded man who (I can’t remember how) suddenly becomes clever and fully aware. Perhaps he takes a drug of some kind, or someone experiments on him. Anyway, for a while he is bright enough to realise he was retarded and isn’t any longer. He feels as if a miracle has happened. He falls in love and starts to live a full, happy life. And then the effect of the drug or experiment starts to wear