Both of You (DCI Clements, #1)

by Adele Parks

After you’ve lost someone you never look at the world in the same way again, everything is unsure. You expect the worst.

I gave each boyfriend the part of me I knew they would find palatable, but I never gave the whole package.

People think losing a child is the worst thing that can happen in the world. I glance at the young boys – who are absorbed in trailing Lego cars through apple juice puddles and therefore not listening to our snatched and whispered conversations – and wonder if the worst thing in the world is losing your mother.

I suppose it depends on the age of the person who dies. It isn’t a competition. Grief seeps everywhere.

Reputations are not always fair or accurate. Not constant. Some are hard won and easily lost. Others gained easily but harder to shake.

That’s what locked-up women do. They try to talk to their captors, find something human and empathetic about him. It’s such bullshit. Be nice. Be good. Even when you have been abducted and chained.

The preparation of a drink is supposed to be a celebratory sound. If you are drinking with your spouse, friends or family, I guess it is. Alone, the ice sounds like chains clinking.

Funny formal word, estranged. We throw ourselves into formality, don’t we? When we are ashamed, or sad or simply defeated. I don’t know when else that word is used except when families splinter: husbands and wives, parents and their children. People who should be closest become as strangers.

Regret is kneejerk.

There are worse things to be. Some people are cheats, or liars. Some people dodge their responsibilities. Some people are stuck in the past and waste the now.

Love’s first imprint is precise.

Because those things go on regardless of the decisions I make. I am small and want to be bigger.

In just minutes I tear us apart, which suggests we are only paper thin.

That’s the point of money, it affords opportunities.

He was really angry. He made a big fuss, but I think it’s different with men. If they make a fuss it is not hormonal, it’s because they are cross with their stupid wives or stupid daughters.

Women over twenty-seven have to work so much harder to exist, even being murdered isn’t enough to incite sympathy, unless you are cute.

Most people live like Leigh Fletcher, in amongst a comfortable amount of clutter. They want their homes stuffed full of colour, vintage rugs and mirrors, endless mismatched prints on the walls.

at Mark Fletcher too, before Leigh. But not women who are seduced by credit cards – women who wanted to have families and to see their husband carry their kids on his shoulders, kick a football with them, pitch a tent.

We hear of the other woman, not the other man. No one thinks a man can be anything other than centre stage. He is never just a bit on the side. He is never called a homewrecker.

Mark is indeed a lovely man, he is not a happy man, not entirely and he never will be; I can’t change that. He is slightly depressed. The world disappoints him.

That is the hardest, dead people are easy to love and impossible to compete with.

Sex makes people vulnerable.

Being married is about legal rights and shared financial goals and responsibilities, yes, but really it is about the other stuff. The nebulous, nuanced stuff like secret in-jokes and pet names – ‘you had to be there’, ‘Oh, it’s just something we say to each other’ – having a private, non-verbal language whereby a single look might say ‘let’s get out of here’ or ‘he’s a wanker’ or ‘I love you’. Different looks, obviously.

Sleep is an act of trust.

Because one dead wife is a tragedy until a second goes missing and then it is a genuine problem.

‘The thing is, in marriages, in all relationships, sometimes, we do things badly. We are in the wrong, we make mistakes. Life is full of small, undignified moments, insignificant like grains of sand but when they start to add up, to stack up, you make entire beaches of pain.