He made a statement, she felt, when he picked her. He chose a woman who could help him, who could be his equal.
So, now what? If he is having an affair, then, to Jayne, a future in which he has been unfaithful is no better than one in which he is dead. Her sense of morality is powerful. Compromise is not an option.
But it’s only a suspicion, a fantasy. Based on an unmade bed. And a scent. She reminds herself that she is not her most rational self. That the events of the past twenty-four hours have driven her to this.
Edie has driven all of them to the limits of their rationality and beyond.
Her fingers start to jitter, bouncing up and down on her thigh. What to do next? Visit Mark’s office, maybe? Call other people? But who? His friends are the gang. She doesn’t have numbers for his colleagues.
She becomes aware of damp seeping into the seat of her trousers. It’s the bathmat, a thick, useless thing that never dries out properly in the in-between seasons.
Mark never takes a bath. He hates them. Jayne thinks for a moment and puts two and two together. She reaches for a bottle of bath oil that she was given last Christmas and has never been used.The top unscrews easily, and its scent is identical to the one she’s detected in the house.
She knows who loves a bath: Edie. Doyenne of bath time, she is, ready to tell you how many candles she lights around the tub, which novel she just couldn’t stop reading until the water went cold, how it’s the only way to warm her bones in winter, a home-spa, just agorgeousway to spend an hour because self-care is so important, don’t you think? Jayne?
Jayne doesn’t. Lying in a bath feels, to her, like wallowing in dirty water.
Her hands clench around the mat. The extent of the dampness suggests that the bath wasn’t taken very recently. It’s only a guess, but she reckons it was yesterday. And it stinks. It’s the source of the smell, for sure. Edie must have spilled bath oil on it.
She drops the mat and kicks it into the corner, feeling a sudden surge of anger and an urge to trash the room. She wants cracked tiles, smashed fixtures, a broken mirror, every bottle and tube emptied or squeezed out onto the floor; she wants noise and mess and destruction to blot out reality. Sometimes, she disassociates, and sometimes she loses control. And when she loses control, it’s spectacular.
The sound of the front door interrupts her rising anger.
She hears a sharp intake of breath, her own. “Mark?” she says, a whisper.
The door slams. The noise seems to reverberate through her.
She stands up.
“Mark?” she calls.
When she’s sure he’s left the house, Imogen tips the hot chocolate down the sink and swills her mouth out over and over. Sheonly pretended to take a sip of the drink in front of him and he fell for it.
She’s been thinking about it. He must have slipped her a roofie. It’s the only explanation Imogen can come up with for what happened to her last night.
It’s terrifying, but nothing else makes sense. She’s never going to eat or drink anything he makes her again.
But if he drugged her before, why did he do it? She knows why women get roofied. But she woke up fully dressed, tucked up in bed. There was no soreness or pain, no suspicion that he’d touched her inappropriately. She’s sure she wasn’t violated.
But he drugged her for a reason. She just doesn’t know what it is.
If she had her phone, she would call the police. What about her laptop? She remembers it suddenly, gratefully, and searches all over but can’t find it. Edie must have taken it with her, she thinks, even though she’s not strictly allowed tech at her retreat. But Edie’s never been afraid to bend the rules when she wants to and she has a habit of borrowing the laptop when she gets frustrated with her iPad, which Imogen can’t find either.
Everything feels wrong and Imogen’s very unsure whether to stay in the house, or not.
If she lived on a street like Jemma’s, with rows of semis, she’d feel safer. She thinks about running to a neighbor’s house but they’re a way away and Edie and Rob never cultivated relationships with them. If she leaves via the front what’s to say he won’t be waiting outside on the lane, watching to see if she tries to run away again? She doesn’t feel it’s safe to go back to the railway line, behind the house either, because he’ll find her there just like he did before. And what will he do then? She’s afraid to think of it. He’s a psycho.
Where will she be safest? She doesn’t know the answer, but she realizes she’s more afraid of leaving the house than of staying.
She checks the time. It’s after six o’clock and her mum wasdue home any time from five thirty so she could be back any minute and all of this will go away. But what if he comes back before Edie does?
Her chest feels tight, her heart rate so fast she’s afraid she’ll faint, but she paces the house and double checks that she put the chain on the door properly. Even with a key, he can’t push past that. She’ll watch the front of the house, and if he gets back before Edie, she’ll hide.
She wishes they had a landline. Edie got rid of it. Too expensive, she said, and pointless because they got such good cell reception here.
Imogen looks at her arm. He held her so hard earlier that it still aches. She can see a constellation of small bruises, like shadows on her skin. She feels as if he’s marked her. It’s a violation.
The memory of his grip on her arm won’t leave her. He could have killed me. It would have been easy for him.
