‘Thanks. I’m going to knock on Julia’s door to make sure she’s okay.’
I start to walk off but Adrian grabs my hand. ‘What about you? How areyoudoing?’
‘I’m fine.’
He squeezes my fingers gently, and I smile before I walk away, aware that his eyes are on me. I stop outside Julia’s door. When I turn back, Adrian is ushering Janice down the stairs, her suitcase in one hand, his jaw set. His eyes meet mine and he pulls a silly face behind Janice’s back. I can’t help but laugh. ‘You wally,’ I mouth.
I rap on Julia’s door. There’s no answer. I call her name through the wood. I wonder if she’s somewhere with Nathan, talking through everything. I do hope so.
I glance out of the picture window. It’s raining again and the sky has darkened so that it looks a lot later than three o’clock. I’m about to retreat when the door is wrestled open and Julia is standing there. She looks dreadful. Her usual pristine bob is a mess, her Liberty-print long-sleeved T-shirt is dishevelled and her eyes are red and puffy.
‘Oh, Julia, I’m so sorry,’ I say.
Without speaking, she opens the door wider and I follow her into the room.
The bed is unmade. Perhaps she fell asleep in her clothes.
She slumps against the headboard. ‘Did you know?’
‘I only found out yesterday, like you. I had no idea before that. Nathan is devastated and deeply sorry. It only happened once.’
She holds up her hand to stop me. ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’
‘I understand.’
She closes her eyes and I’m not sure what to do: comfort her or leave her in peace? I decide to sit down beside her. She doesn’t say anything for a few minutes and when she does her voice cracks: ‘He’s got a child. Part of me is jealous that she’s not mine.’
I rub her forearm in response. She inches her weight further into the middle of the bed so that I can sit beside her, legs stretched out, our shoulders touching as we lean against the headboard.
‘I want a child so desperately,’ she says eventually. ‘And Ruby’s been through so much … Look at this.’ She gets up and grabs her laptop from the oak dressing-table. ‘I found a blog of Selena’s. Did you know that for the last few years she’s been documenting Ruby’sabuse?’
I flinch. The word sounds so harsh. Yet if what Julia is saying is true, that’s exactly what it was.
She joins me on the bed and places the laptop on my legs. ‘Look.’
I pull it further up my thighs. The page in front of me is pink and red, with rubies and diamonds cascading down the screen, like raindrops. The title reads ‘PRECIOUS RUBY’ and there is a small square photograph in the corner of the screen of Ruby in a hospital bed wired up to a drip, clutching her mouse. My heart contracts. The words make for sickening reading. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think it was the blog of a caring mother, desperately worried about her child. You’d think it was about her frustration and her desire to make sure the doctors found out why her daughter was so ill. But now, in light of Julia’s theory, it’s disturbing. Bile rises in my throat, and I push the computer away, unable to read any more. ‘Do you really think it’s true?’
Julia is kneeling beside me on the bed. ‘I’m looking at this without bias, I promise,’ she says gently. ‘I’m angry at what Selena and Nathan did. But I don’t blame her. He was the one in a relationship. All of this, though, it’s the classic symptoms. Numerous operations but nothing wrong. Ruby’s symptoms worsening at home yet miraculously disappearing in hospital. The fact she moved Ruby to so many different GP surgeries.’ She gulps. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘What do we do now?’ I whisper.
‘We need to tell the police,’ she says, ‘because her blog might be the reason she was killed. She had a lot of followers. What if one of them got obsessed? Or grasped what she was up to?’
I think of the guests who came and went this week: the teenage lovebirds, Janice, Dean. Then my mind turns to the Greysons. Weren’t they in the medical field? I’m sure Susie said she worked at a hospital. Did she say she was a nurse? Had she ever treated Ruby and suspected what Selena was up to?
I’m just clutching at anything. But the truth remains: I don’t know who to trust.
‘And what about Ruby?’ I whisper.
Julia rubs at her eyes. She’s wearing no make-up. ‘She’s the most important person in all of this. We must protect her,’ she says. ‘At all costs.’
35
I leave Julia to rest but I can’t forget Selena’s blog, those words and that photo of Ruby in a hospital bed. How could a mother do that to her child? I’d rather die than see my daughters hurt or in pain. I can’t connect this Selena to the one I knew, who seemed so protective of Ruby. There’s still a huge part of me that can’t believe Selena would do it and I’m still hoping that Julia’s got it wrong.
I’m heading downstairs when I see Adrian standing in the doorway talking to a man I don’t recognize. He’s in his early fifties with grey hair and blue eyes. His face is long and thin, with a sharp nose and a large mole on one cheek. Adrian steps back to allow him in. Maybe he’s a guest who wants a room for the night. Or the weekend. I bristle with anticipation and excitement. This house already had a reputation, which has only been cemented by the events of this week. If things don’t pick up soon we’ll struggle to pay our mortgage …
I stop when I reach the bottom step. Adrian’s closing the door behind him and ushering the man into the living room. He glances at me over the man’s head and pulls a face, as if the gas man had turned up unexpectedly to do a reading, or a parking attendant was on the prowl and we had only moments to dash back to our car. This man isn’t a guest.
