Two Way Street - Chapter Three

As the sun set, the music turned off next door. She went to the loungeroom window, pressing up against the curtains that they had picked together and that she had hemmed to length during a movie marathon whilst he had sanded back the skirting boards in the room, looking out across the front lawn they had sown together, to the other house. After a moment, the lights inside turned off, and the porch light on. He stepped out the front door, pausing to lock it.

He did not look like Owen. His hair was styled differently, and the clothing he wore… All of it she recognised having bought, or washed at some time or another, but the way it was assembled on him was somehow… different. A contrived casual dishevelment with the cuffs folded back on his jeans, collar arranged just so, buttons open to show a snug white t-shirt below. He put the keys into his pocket and strolled casually to the car, his long legs covering the distance in no time.

Where was he going? She wondered as he pulled away. But more so… How could he look so relaxed and cheerful when he had just torn her world apart? She waited at the window, frozen into place, like a caricature of a nosy neighbour. Perhaps he was just going to the shops. An hour passed, and nothing. She peeled herself away from the curtains.

She took the spare keys out of the drawer in the hall table where keys lived in between uses and let herself out of the house. She crept across the slightly overgrown grass like a criminal. Technically, it was her house, she told herself defensively trying to shake off the feeling of doing wrong. Somehow in all this, they had reversed ownership, and he had moved out into the house she legally owned, whilst she remained in the one that he did. Perhaps he had thought, as he was the one leaving, it made more sense, was more considerate, rather than move her out, but it hardly mattered, she justified. It meant that she had the greater right to let herself into the house, then he had to be there.

Even if she was doing so in order to go through his things.

She was tense as she unlocked the door and turned on the lights. But it was just Owen. If he came back, she would say she wanted to speak with him. She had plenty of reason to want to do so, after all.

How had one day made a stranger of him?

The house smelled of the renovations, glue, fresh paint, and wood-dust. It echoed hollowly as she closed the door behind her. There was no furniture in the house to absorb the sound, and the lounge and hallway floors were still bare cement. The floating floorboards were stacked in the lounge waiting installation. It had been their plan for the next day to begin that.

Did he plan on doing it by himself, now?

The thought of Owen finishing the renovations on the house that they had been meant to live in as a married couple and eventually a family, brought the tears to her eyes again and she rubbed them away with the backs of her hands impatiently. It was not the time for another melt down, she scolded herself, she didn’t know when he would be back, and she didn’t want to be caught skulking through his things. There was a desperation and lack of dignity to being found doing so. To doing so, in the first place, she admitted as she crept down the hall.

In the bedroom, he had set up a very makeshift bed from a camping mattress he must have borrowed from Daniel, and a sleeping bag. There was something very adolescent about the arrangement. At least if Megan were right, Emily thought wryly, and he was planning on hooking up, he would not be bringing his dates back to the house to f-k. No woman in her right mind would think it was a sexy set up, as bare as it was of even the most basic furniture.

His beaten-up suitcases and shoes, and a few boxes of items from the house, were stacked against the wall with little care, as if he had impatiently shoved what he considered unimportant there and moved on to other things. As was typical of his priorities, his guitar and amp were perfectly set up with attention to detail and had a notepad and paper next to them indicating that even in the short time since he had moved out, he had found time to play. She flicked through the notepad. Music and lyrics. There was nothing unusual to that.

Ever since they were teenagers, Owen had composed his own songs. Some of them they had performed together during high school, and during their university years when they had played at weddings, restaurants, or busked for extra cash. Owen had always loved performing, but it had never been something she had liked to do. She had always felt like a mouse pretending to be a peacock when she performed.

She loved to sing, had studied opera for many years, but her voice belonged to someone else, she had always thought. Someone bolder, someone flashier, someone more vivid than she was. She had given away her studies when there had been nowhere left to go other than pursue it as a career, because singing for a living wasn’t something she could imagine herself doing.

She had performed because Owen had wanted to, but he had known that she was not comfortable on the stage, and slowly, over the years, in concession to her reluctance, he had stopped asking and she had been relieved.

She almost set the notepad aside, but then hesitated. Sometimes Owen, in haste, would write things down on the back cover of last page of his notebooks, that were not music related. She turned the notepad to the back. On the last page, was something scrawled in messy, almost illegible handwriting. She flipped the notepad upside down, making the last page the first. “Two Way Street. Cordelia, 7pm, High Street.”

Cordelia. Cordelia was the name of the wedding singer they had hired. A pretty, young woman with a slightly husky voice that Owen had thought was great. She’d had a good repertoire, and an easy-going charm that made her very approachable. Emily had thought she seemed a little spacey and vague and had hoped she would not prove unreliable on the day, but Owen had been keen to give her a shot.

They had never met her on High Street at 7pm, it had always been daytime. Initially they had met at a coffee shop, and later had gone to see her perform at a winery, doubling an audition with a date night. Emily remembered how lovely it had been, sitting in the dapple shade of a grape vine, eating cheese and olives and drinking wine with Owen, listening to Cordelia sing, and imagining their wedding together.

Her heart tightened in pain.

She checked her phone. It was nearly eight. No, she told herself firmly. This was not a corny romantic comedy where the groom fell in love with the wedding singer, and realised he was not in love with his childhood sweetheart. That sort of thing did not happen in real life.

There was some other explanation.