The Husband’s Secret

some women experienced. Other women. She’d always thought anxious people were cute. Dear little anxious people like Sarah Sacks. She wanted to pat their worry-filled heads.
    Perhaps if she opened the letter and saw that it was nothing she would get everything back in focus. She had things to do. Two baskets of laundry to fold. Three urgent phone calls to make. Gluten-free slice to bake for the gluten-intolerant members of the School Website Project Group (ie Janine Davidson) which would be meeting tomorrow.
    There were other things beside the letter that could be making her feel anxious.
    The sex thing, for example. That was always at the back of her mind.
    She frowned and ran her hands down the sides of her waist. Her ‘oblique muscles’ according to her Pilates teacher. Oh, look, the sex thing was nothing. It was not actually on her mind. She refused to let it be on her mind. It was of no consequence.
    It was true, perhaps, that ever since that morning last year she’d been aware of an underlying sense of fragility, a new understanding that a life of coriander and laundry could be stolen in an instant, that your ordinariness could vanish and suddenly you’re a woman on your knees, your face lifted to the sky and some women are running to help, but others arealready averting their heads, with the words not articulated, but felt: Don’t let this touch me.
    Cecilia saw it again for the thousandth time: Little Spiderman flying. She was one of the women who ran. Well, of course she was, throwing open her car door, even though she knew that nothing she did would make any difference. It wasn’t her school, her neighbourhood, her parish. None of her children had ever played with the little boy. She’d never had coffee with the woman on her knees. She just happened to be stopped at the lights on the other side of the intersection when it happened. A little boy, probably about five, dressed in a red and blue full-body Spiderman suit was waiting at the side of the road, holding his mother’s hand. It was Book Week. That’s why the little boy was dressed up. Cecilia was watching him, thinking, Mmmm, actually Spiderman is not a character from a book, when for no reason that she could see, the little boy dropped his mother’s hand and stepped off the kerb into the traffic. Cecilia screamed. She also, she remembered later, instinctively banged her fist on her horn.
    If Cecilia had driven by just moments later she would have missed seeing it happen. Ten minutes later and the little boy’s death would have meant nothing more to her than another traffic detour. Now it was a memory that would probably cause her grandchildren to one day say, ‘Don’t hold my hand so tight, Grandma.’
    Obviously there was no connection between little Spiderman and this letter.
    He just came into her mind at strange times.
    Cecilia flicked the letter across the table with her fingertip and picked up Esther’s library book: The Rise and Fall of the Berlin Wall.
    So, the Berlin Wall. Wonderful.
    The first she’d known that the Berlin Wall was about tobecome a significant part of her life had been at breakfast this morning.
    It had been just Cecilia and Esther sitting at the kitchen table. John-Paul was overseas, in Chicago until Friday, and Isabel and Polly were still asleep.
    Cecilia didn’t normally sit down in the mornings. She generally ate her breakfast standing at the breakfast counter while she made lunches, checked her Tupperware orders on her iPad, unpacked the dishwasher, texted clients about their parties, whatever, but it was a rare opportunity to have some time alone with her odd, darling middle daughter, so she sat down with her Bircher muesli, while Esther powered her way through a bowl of rice bubbles, and waited.
    She’d learned that with her daughters. Don’t say a word. Don’t ask a question. Give them enough time and they’d finally tell you what was on their mind. It was like fishing. It took silence and patience. (Or so she’d heard. Cecilia would rather hammer nails into her forehead than go fishing.)
    Silence didn’t come naturally to her. Cecilia was a talker. ‘Seriously, do you ever shut the hell up?’ an ex-boyfriend had said to her once. She talked a lot when she was nervous. That ex-boyfriend must have made her nervous. Although, she also talked a lot when she was happy.
    But she didn’t say anything that morning. She just ate, and waited, and sure enough, Esther started talking.
    ‘Mum,’ she