Elodie breathes out, long and slow, her mouth full of cobwebs. “Something like that.”
Bren bounds into the room and without warning dives onto the bed. He tackles Jude, who tips sideways with a shriek, and for a second they are all arms and legs, tangled in the bedsheets. She reaches for Jude, expecting him to lash out in muted fury at the interruption to his game, at being touched.
But he’s laughing.
Bren pins him to the bed and tickles, Jude writhing and giggling so hard he can barely breathe.
It leaves her there, useless, one arm outstretched for an intervention that isn’t needed. Nothing about her is needed in that moment. Shemoves away, pulling the blankets around herself to hide the shivering as she watches Bren gaze down at Jude with the soft fondness he usually reserves for the unborn baby in her belly.
He tickles under Jude’s chin and then glances up at Elodie. “I finished the dining room. Got the wainscoting done too. Though—okay, it’s not finished because I’m waiting on the chandelier to arrive. Got this epic piece from an antique dealer, but tell me it’s a terrible idea to paint it black.” He looks animated by the very thought.
She shrugs a shoulder. “Paint it black, you coward.” It’s what he wants to hear.
He grins and then lunges to grab Jude’s ankle before he worms away, dragging him back across the duvets and making anom-nomsound as he pretends to eat Jude’s foot. It sends Jude into another fit of laughter.
All week she has cared for Jude, run after him, played with him, redirected meltdowns, avoided getting hit, changed his sheets after accidents, made endless snacks, cleaned his messes—and yet this is the first time he’s been vividly, breathlessly happy.
“Also, good news,” Bren says. “Guess who starts preschool tomorrow!”
Jude’s eyes go big. “With Ms. Heather?”
“Nope,” Bren says. “You’re going to a new school. It’ll be so fun. They have a super-duper big outdoor play area and they sing songs and do puzzles. Sounds like the best place ever, hey, Jude?”
He frowns, his fingers tugging at the paint flecks on Bren’s shirt, anxious and picky, a sign he isn’t sure about this new unknown.
Bren lowers his voice as he glances at Elodie. “Everything’s sorted. I…fixedthe paperwork and then toured the preschool on Friday after work. Had a chat with them about how he is. Neat little place, very casual. They emphasize lots of learning through playtime, which is what you want.”
It feels like an invitation to open a fight, but she says nothing.
“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” he goes on. “Four-year-old Jude January is off to preschool on Monday.”
Jude January.
She doesn’t know how to parse the shape of it.
Bren heaves himself off the bed and scoops up Jude, flinging him over his shoulder like a sack of wiggling potatoes. Then he leans down and kisses Elodie. She almost turns away.
“Bren.” She tries to keep her voice even. “There’s something… I heard something in the wall—”
“Nope. House is fine. You’re leaving it to me, remember?” He turns on his heel, still carrying Jude. “I’ll do bath and bed. You relax.” Then he’s out in the hall, singing something off-key that makes Jude laugh, neither of them glancing back at her even once.
This is what she agreed to, the bargain she made, to let him take care of Jude.
It should be a joy, a delight, she should collapse in relief that she can sleep while Jude is watched by a man who owes him nothing and yet offers him love anyway.Jude January.The thorns of it pierce the underside of her tongue.
She curls in bed and pulls blankets over her head so that later, when Jude begins to cry from the depths of the house over some unknown slight, she can pretend she doesn’t hear it, isn’t worried. She is trusting her husband with her child.
Her guilt, her rage, pulses like a second bloody heartbeat in the back of her throat.
FOURTEEN
She wakes to a handat her throat, pressing down hard and slow, as if the wish to strangle her is a thing to be done at a languorous pace.
Gray light filters between the heavy drapes, not quite reaching the side of her bed where the creature hovers over her with eye sockets emptied, its fingers like bent nails digging deeper into the soft tissue of her neck. Her scream is trapped. She tries to jerk away, clawing for Bren in the predawn gloom, but then a tiny voice hisses, so fissured with rage, that her mussy, half-awake brain doesn’t recognize it at first.
“Mama.”
She strikes out blindly and shoves him away, sitting up with a sharp gasp as the pressure on her throat releases. Her entire neck aches as she swallows again and again, trying to shake that feeling of strangulation. Of suffocation.
