‘You can tell me,’ he told her softly. ‘The thing that’s keeping you moving. You can tell me. I won’t judge.’
It took a long time to answer.
‘Well,’ Joy began, and her throat constricted at the things lining up, things she found she really wanted to tell him.
He pulled her closer and pressed a kiss to the top of her head, tucking the covers around them again until she felt like she was in a nest.
‘It started with Sean.’ Just saying his name in the little safe bubble they’d formed brought up a heavy, stifling weight in her chest.
But it was too late to go back to silence so she talked him through the whole thing. Telling him how, after months of holding her breath in her flat, waiting for the moment he would crash back into her life, though he never came, she had the idea to begin travelling for work, carrying baby Radia with her. European jobs at first, then further afield. How it had taken her ages to get back in command of her fears. How she had only just recently, since coming to Clove Lore, in fact, begun to remember who she’d been before Sean.
Monty took it all in. The way Sean had insisted he drive her whenever she needed to go out, restricting her mobility and making it look like attentiveness. How he’d set impossible standards she couldn’t possibly meet, and then he’d make her feel she was to blame when she fell short.
‘I know people might think I should have reported him to the police or something.’
Monty didn’t say anything, only pulling a face that suggested he hadn’t been thinking that at all. Joy was too wrapped up in defending herself to notice.
‘But what would I say? That I lived with a guy who purposefully burned dinner every night for weeks so he could blame me for not being home in time, even though heknewI finished work at five thirty and got home at six, but he wanted me home for half-five when he served up. Can you report someone for making you walk on eggshells? Nobody handed him all my passwords and online accounts but me. I did that myself. What could the police do with that? How could I tell them I’d let myself get pregnant with this guy? I’d brought it all on myself. That’s how it looked. How itstilllooks.’
Monty’s jaw was flexing and his grip tightened around her as she spoke, but he didn’t say anything, only kissing her head and stroking her arm all the more.
‘He visited us once in the hospital,’ Joy spoke on. ‘Gave Rads her Charley fox, and that was it. He walked out smiling, saying he’d be back that evening, and he never came back, didn’t call, nothing. I waited for him to pick us up from hospital, rang his mobile, left messages. It didn’t occur to me that this was our chance to get away from him; all I wanted was for him to come and get us. I’d forgotten how to live without him running everything. In the end, the midwives said I couldn’t just hang around anymore so I called a cab and a locksmith. When we got home the guy was already waiting on the steps. He changed the locks there and then and I shut me and Radia inside. And we stayed inside.’
Remembering the feeling of waiting, wondering what was going to happen to her next, made her chest tighten and she rubbed at the ache, taking a moment to breathe through her mantra the way the doctor had told her.Sean isn’t here. He doesn’t even know where we are. He doesn’t want us now anyway. It’s over.
Monty didn’t ask if she was all right. He only waited. Finally, she recovered her breath enough to go on.
‘We lived so quietly, with the blinds shut all the time, trying to be invisible. I was afraid to step outside in case he was waiting, watching us. I was paranoid.’ She gave a wry laugh. ‘I was more afraid of him once he disappeared than I ever was while he lived with me.
‘Anyway, I knew we couldn’t go on like that, but I just couldn’t bring myself to sell my little flat. I was adamant about that. That wasmyplace, not his. It was all I had. That and loads of good tech contacts. Instead of going back to where I worked, a place called Tech Stars, after my maternity leave was up, I bid for loads of freelance stuff, didn’t matter where in the world they were, and I lined them all up in my diary. Got Rad’s passport sorted out too. Pretty soon we were out of there. And we’ve been moving around ever since.’
‘And your flat’s standing empty? Not rented out?’
‘Nope.’ How could she hand over keys to strangers, no matter how well she vetted them? Not when Sean could turn up any time and insist it was his place, making them leave, moving himself back in. The idea of him inside her home made her shudder. ‘Peace is priceless,’ she said.
Monty hesitated before letting the words out. ‘Are you living in peace?’
The question, so innocently asked, shook her down her spine. She ran through her mantra once more in her mind. ‘We’re safe,’ she told him afterwards. ‘As long as we keep moving.’
‘Do you think he really is looking for you?’
Joy didn’t know how to tell him there’d been no sign of Sean since that day at the hospital, but the menacing sense that he was out there in the world, possibly wanting contact with his daughter, was too terrifying a prospect to test out by allowing him to find them.
‘Are you going to sell the flat? He’d never know where you were then? There’d be no point on the map where he could potentially locate you.’
‘I would… I mean, I should, but…’ She thought of the little primary school around the corner from her home, and the place waiting for Radia. You don’t just give up a spot in an outstanding primary school, or a flat a stone’s throw from countless IT start-ups and some of the biggest tech companies in London. If she was going to go home and find work again, that was the place to be. That was the reason she’d chosen her street in the first place.
It was the flat she’d worked for, which she owned outright. Which she’d loved. An increasingly large part of her wanted to turn the key and say the words, ‘Rads, we’re home and we’re here for good.’
‘The longer I’ve been here, the more I’ve remembered all the things about my old life I used to love. I was part of a team at work. We workedsohard, then we’d have LAN parties, stay up all night gaming, and in the morning we’d do these scone and coffee runs. We’d hit the bars some nights, cinemas and restaurants. And I loved being alone in the flat, cooking or sitting out in my little yard, and I loved Radia being in there with me, in a weird way, even after everything Sean was putting me through. I loved it being just the two of us there.’
‘Sometimes you give up the good stuff so the people you love most can have what they need,’ said Monty. The next words flew straight from his subconscious: ‘Like I walked away from the boat so Tom can keep fishing. I still top up the family bank account; I doubt he even knows that. It helps when there’s a run of bad catches, and I always, always pay off his tab at the Siren.’
Tipping her head to look up at him, she said, ‘And it’s working?’
‘Kind of,’ Monty told her with a shrug. ‘In some ways. Tom’s happy, that’s what matters.’
‘But you’re not?’
