The Beach Hut by Veronica Henry

her feel as if she was walking on air one minute, then as if she had the weight of the world on her shoulders the next. She would be skipping around the aisles in Sainsbury’s with a silly grin on her face, singing to herself, for heaven’s sake, only to go home and bury her head in her arms for half an hour, completely paralysed, unable to speak, think, operate on any level. Oh, the agony and the ecstasy. Pandora’s box wasn’t quite open yet, but she definitely had her fingers on the lid, ready to prise it off.
    How had this happened to her? Sarah wasn’t the sort of person to be unfaithful, although she suspected no one was until they found themselves on the brink of it. No one went into marriage thinking, ‘It’s OK, I can sleep with whoever I like when I get bored. No biggie.’ It just happened.
    The obvious answer was that it was a mid-life crisis. She was, after all, thirty-six. Technically mid-life, if you still went by three score years and ten. Her children were eight and six, which meant life was far, far easier than it had been - they were at school, they didn’t need so much mollycoddling, they could get themselves ready for bed, do their own teeth, wipe their own bottoms. So she had more time on her hands - she was no longer in that fug of lack of sleep, car seats and push-chairs and potties, everything slightly crusted in dried food, biscuit crumbs everywhere. Life had a routine, a pleasant, manageable routine, and she was organised enough to keep on top of most things - she wasn’t an anal control freak, but neither was there full-scale panic on a regular basis. She remembered spellings and swimming kit and home-made cookies for the school coffee morning most of the time, and didn’t go into meltdown if something was forgotten.
    So yes, maybe she did have too much time on her hands.
    As for her and Ian, if challenged, she would have said they were still basically quite happy. She remembered when they had first got together, the tiny little house they had bought in Harbourne, a fashionable area of Birmingham with a warren of streets full of aspirational couples just like them. They had done it up themselves, spending the weekends sanding floorboards and stripping skirting boards, revealing all the original features but giving it a modern twist with Sarah’s paint effects, so that when they eventually came to sell it, when the two girls came along and they finally couldn’t squeeze another thing inside its four walls, they got what seemed a ridiculously high price for a two-bedroomed terrace.
    It had been Ian who had insisted they move to Hagley, a ‘village’ on the outskirts of the city, insisting that the schools were better, that the girls needed fresh air and access to the countryside. The move coincided with him joining a big corporate firm in Birmingham, a totally different kettle of fish from the family-run outfit he had been working for. Sarah wasn’t sure if it was the change of house or the change of job that had altered him, but after the move Ian seemed to have a different set of values.
    He seemed very preoccupied by things that didn’t matter a jot to Sarah - what cars they were driving, where they went on holiday, what they wore, where they ate out, who they socialised with. When she confronted him about it, he asked what was wrong with him wanting the best for them? And she supposed there was nothing wrong, as such, but he didn’t need to be so obsessed . She’d been quite happy with her old Micra, but he had insisted on chopping it in for a shiny new Golf, even though it meant taking out a loan. And he’d bought her a private number plate for her birthday, which was absolutely the last thing on earth she had wanted. She wanted to be anonymous when she was out driving. She didn’t want people to watch her while she hashed up parallel parking on the high street. He had watched in satisfied smug pleasure as she had opened it, and she had to feign gratitude, even though she