“Fine, thanks.” Rachel needlessly rearranged a few of the bottles and rags in her bucket of cleaning supplies, her head bent so her hair fell in front of her face and hid her expression, which she knew she couldn’t trust at that moment. “Never better.”
“How’s your mum?” Claire asked, and Rachel stiffened. Claire had never talked about her mother; they’d stopped being friends right before Janice Campbell had had her accident.
“Fine. I mean, the same.” When Rachel was eleven, Janice Campbell had fallen down the stairs of one of the houses she’d been cleaning and had broken her back. She’d been virtually bedridden since.
“And... your sister?” Claire asked hesitantly, and Rachel knew she was feeling her way through the dark, trying to be polite.
“Sisters,” she corrected. “They’re both fine. Thank you for asking.” She forced a bright smile. “How are you? Broken engagement aside, I mean?”
Claire let out a soft, hesitant laugh. “Truthfully? I don’t know.”
It didn’t really surprise Rachel that Claire didn’t know how she was feeling; she’d always been like that, waffling over everything, even who she was friends with. And now Rachel no longer cared.
“Well, then.” She hoisted her mop and pail. “I’d better get back upstairs.”
“Right.” Claire moved out of the way again, and Rachel brushed past her before heading upstairs. She cleaned the bathroom Claire had used, spritzing the mirrors and sink, opening the window to let out the steam, half listening to Claire move around downstairs.
When she was finished, she came back down and found Claire in the center of the sitting room, standing there as if she were lost in her own house.
“So I’ll be back next week,” Rachel announced, “unless you’d like me to come sooner than that? Since you’re staying? Normally I just do a quick tidy because there’s no one here.” She didn’t relish the thought of cleaning up after Claire, but she could use the money. She could always use the money.
“Oh, once a week is fine. I’m not... I mean...” She shrugged, and Rachel remembered how Claire hadn’t always finished her sentences.
“Okay, then. See you next week.”
Rachel loaded her cleaning supplies into the back of the hatchback she used to get to her various jobs; Campbell Cleaners was painted on the side, along with her mobile phone number. Her sister Meghan had protested the advertisement, since the car was the only one they had, but Rachel had ignored her.
“When you’re making as much money as I am,” she’d stated, “then you can buy your own car, or at least contribute more to the family finances.”
Meghan had rolled her eyes, caught as ever between laughing it off and being annoyed. Lily had looked guilty, and her mother had pretended not to hear the whole exchange.
Now Rachel slid into the driver’s seat of her car and headed down the steep, winding lane from the Wests’ house to the beach road. The wind had started up again, blowing off the sea, and the clumps of daffodils that lined the road huddled against its onslaught. She had ten minutes to get to her cleaning jobfor the Browns, a busy family with two working parents and three school-aged children, and then she’d drop the ironing she’d done for Juliet Bagshaw at Tarn House Bed-and-Breakfast before heading back home to see to dinner, tidy up, and make sure Lily, who was only two months away from doing her A levels, put in at least three hours of study. She was predicted for three As, maybe even an A star in biology, and if she got the marks, she would be going to University of Durham in the autumn. Rachel was determined to see that happen.
Three hours later Rachel pulled up to the terraced house on the upper end of Hartley-by-the-Sea’s high street that had been her home since she was a baby. The gutters were crooked, the paint on the front door was peeling, and the once-white net curtains framing the front window were the color of weak tea. Her house was definitely not an advertisement for her cleaning services, but then, she didn’t have time to clean her own house. Rachel hauled her cleaning supplies from the back of the car and headed inside.
The first thing she heard was three-year-old Nathan’s shrieking. She walked into the kitchen, tossing the mop and pail into a corner, and glanced at her sister Meghan. Nathan was clinging to Meghan’s legs while she sat at the table, flicking through a magazine. Rachel glanced at the lurid titles on the cover: My Child’s Past Lives and My Fur Stole’s Haunted by the Fox!
She rolled her eyes. “Seriously, Meghan?”
Her sister looked up from the magazine. “What?”
“You’re reading rubbish while Nathan is screaming his head off.” At that moment Nathan chose to go silent, staring at Rachel with wide eyes.
“He’s been screaming all day. He’s getting teeth.”
“He’s three. He has all his teeth.”
“His molars or something. Trust me, I know.” She dropped her magazine onto the table and leaned forward. “Nath, open your mouth.”
Solemnly Nathan opened his mouth wide, and Meghan peered inside. “See? Molars,” she said triumphantly, and Rachel spared a sympathetic glance for her nephew’s reddened, swollen gums before she shrugged off her coat.
“He should have some Calpol.” She fished in the cupboard for a bottle of children’s medicine, the lid sticky with residue, and handed it and a spoon to Meghan, who took it with a sigh, dropping her magazine on the table.
Rachel turned to Lily, who was standing in front of the stove, her red hair, the same color as Rachel’s, caught in a messy knot as she hummed tunelessly and stirred the sauce.
“Lily, you should be studying.”
“I did some homework at school—,” Lily began.
