Brothers at War [#Wattys2017]

ten (ii)

"Matt?" There was a weakness, a vulnerability, which I had never seen in Amena before in the moment she realised that her husband and I had an affair. I didn't miss the tears which were rolling down her cheeks, and neither did Callie, as she walked over to Amena and wrapped her arms around her legs.

"What's wrong Mena?" Callie's questioning eyes looked up at the woman who was a wreck.

"Nothing, sweetie."

"Those happy tears?" I was sure that Callie's inquisitive side was going to get her into trouble one day, but for now she was just an innocent child wondering why Amena was in tears.

"Callie, baby." I knelt in front of her, her blue eyes piercing my own reminding me that her father was practically breathing down my neck, probably trying to muster up an apology for his wife. "Markus is in the garden, and he's got something special to show you."

"Me?" I saw her eyes light up and I smiled, tucking a loose hair behind her ear.

"Yes. If you go and tell him that mummy sent you, and ask him to show you what he showed mummy, then he will do." I didn't want to face either Matt or Amena, but it was going to happen, and I didn't want my daughter knowing that her mother had no qualms sleeping with a married man.

"OK, mummy." She was quick to wrap her arms around my neck and give me a wet kiss on the cheek, before she turned and ran back down the stairs. I knew that, no matter what had happened between Markus and I, he would still do anything for my little girl: even if it hurt him to be around her, I knew that he could never say no to Callie.

"I looked after your daughter, Sophie. I thought of you as a friend and, all this time, you were sleeping with my husband?" I had never had a friend, other than Evva, so to know that Amena thought of me as a friend made this situation even more painful to handle.

"Amena—"

"No. I want to hear from the woman who thought it was acceptable to sleep with a married man." The tiny thread of sanity which Amena appeared to be holding onto had, evidently, snapped and I was the one who was going to get the butt of it.

It was nothing if not deserved. I would take whatever Amena threw at me and I would accept it, because there was no argument for what I had done to the woman who stood before me.

She loved her husband and would climb mountains to make her happy. He would keep other women's beds warm, tell them that he loved them, and then he would go home to his wife and do the exact same thing. She was oblivious to his ways and, while I had never wanted the truth to come out, I was almost relieved that she would see her husband for the man he truly was.

"Are you still sleeping with him?" Amena pushed when I said nothing.

"It ended three years ago. He made it perfectly clear that he could never leave you for me, so I walked away, and I never thought that I would see him again," I sighed.