Peter asks Carla to marry him!
But how will he cope with the shocking truth?
Paranoid Peter demands to know who Carla’s secret man is this week, just days after proposing to his guilty girlfriend!
While she’s come clean about cheating on Peter, Carla is desperate to keep quiet about the fact that it was Adam she took to bed. It looks as though her plan has worked when Peter recommits to their relationship and gets down on one knee. However, just as Peter is asking Carla to marry him, Daniel stumbles upon the truth and confronts Adam. With another person in the know, worried Carla and Adam are in danger of being caught out.
“When Peter proposes, Carla’s absolutely delighted – she can’t believe it,” shares Alison King, who plays the cheating woman. “It means that he’s genuinely forgiven her, and that they can start planning their future together. Daniel finding out could really ruin everything for Carla and Peter, but it’s complicated for him. If he reveals the truth to Peter, then his relationship with Adam is destroyed – having said that, if he keeps quiet, he’s being disloyal to Peter. The situation has the potential to blow the whole family apart…”
Daniel is horrified to realise that not only have Carla and Adam done the unthinkable, but now Peter has proposed without any idea of the scale of betrayal. While Peter starts planning for the wedding, Carla goes to Daniel in order to beg for his silence. Yet when Johnny mentions seeing Carla calling round to his half-brother’s place, Peter’s paranoia goes wild.
“Peter thinks he’s able to forgive her, although the trust has gone,” explains Chris Gascoyne, who plays the struggling alcoholic. “In the back of his mind, he starts to wonder who the man is, and begins to think it’s closer to home than Carla admitted. He knows her history with Daniel, and that starts him thinking.”
Carla is horrified as Peter launches into his attack on Daniel, knowing that the innocent man has every right to correct him. It’s only his loyalty to Adam and fondness for Carla that’s keeping Daniel silent right now, but being falsely accused of bedding his brother’s wife could well tip him over the edge.
After the bruising encounter, tensions are at a boiling point between the couple, and it looks as if Peter is about to break. Carla’s horrified to discover that he’s gone out, and that a bottle of whiskey is missing too – but when Peter returns, things get much, much worse…
“Carla feels partly responsible for how ill Peter is, and the fact that he carried on drinking,” explains Alison. “They’ve both made terrible mistakes before and forgiven each other, but this is another level of betrayal. Peter was at his lowest ebb, back drinking and becoming seriously ill as a result, and Carla slept with his nephew. It would destroy Peter if he knew it was Adam.”
As Carla and Peter’s world crashes down around them, it’s a horrible moment when he takes a swig from the whiskey bottle in defiance of Carla’s pleading. It looks as though the passion between them might finally consume him, plunging both of them into a pit of despair.
“Everything will change if Peter finds out the truth, and I’m not sure what it will do to him, and to them as a couple,” warns Chris. “Peter puts a lot of store in family, he has tried to build security back into his life over the years, and he’s found that with family. It would hurt him deeply that this has happened, and the people he would turn to are the people who have betrayed and hurt him. When Peter feels like that, he self-destructs because he has no one to rely on.”
Just as Peter looks set to implode, so Carla has done the same. According to star Alison, her alter ego is still the architect of her own misery…
“It was a ridiculous mistake in the heat of the moment, and Carla feels terrible, guilty, angry and stupid,” she insists. “She and Peter said some terrible things to each other, so she did what Carla always does; she pressed the self-destruct button. No one could ever do as much damage to Carla as she does to herself. If Peter finds out, it will take something huge to reunite them – and I can’t imagine the Barlow family would be too forgiving towards her or Adam.”
“Everything will change if Peter finds out” ALISON