I haven’t cooked tonight. On the counter in the kitchen, I’ve laid out a tin of baked beans, a packet of plastic white bread. It was a welcome respite from cooking, truth be told, and it gave me the time to take care of some other errands.
I meet Jack’s gaze dead on. It’s something I used to get vilified for.Shestaresa lot, doesn’t she?my university cohort used to whisper when they thought I wasn’t listening. But I was always listening.
And, once again, Jack falters. He takes a tiny step backward, confusion still stamped across his face. It is such a diversion from his usual self-assuredness that I want to laugh. So I do.
The sound is too loud. It shatters the shocked silence that’s settled between us—not the pretty giggle he’s become accustomed to, but a harsher, bigger noise. It’s this that seems to bring Jack to his senses.
“What the fuck is going on?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” I don’t allow my gaze to drop. There’s no bashful look at the floor now.
“Imeanwhy are you dressed in clothes that look like they’ve come from the charity shop? Why haven’t you made dinner? Why are youstaringat me like that? It’s giving me the creeps.” He shudders visibly, and I feel my jaw set. “I don’t have time for this, whatever it is. Go and get changed. We can order something for dinner.”
He walks through to the kitchen, but I don’t go upstairs like a pliant little wife. I follow him.
He moves toward the fridge, grabs a bottle of wine by the neck, pullsdown a glass. I watch him, heart aching, silently begging him to take back what he just said. Wanting him, desperately, to take a sip of his wine and then come to me. Prove me wrong. Take me in his arms and tell me I’m beautiful. Special just as I am. Instead—as though sensing my eyes on him—he swings round again.
“Why are you still standing there? I told you to go and change. And I hope you didn’t expect us to eat thiscrapfor dinner.” He nods toward the baked beans. “Stop staring at me. You’re being so fucking weird.”
I feel something inside of me snap as Jack’s eyes move to the countertop. To the two mugs that I have forgotten to put away. To the one smeared with red lipstick. Serena’s lipstick.
His hand tightens round the stem of his glass. “What’s that?” he says softly. I would have preferred if he had shouted. “Don’t…” he whispers. “Donottell me that you had that woman over.”
I’m normally quite good at thinking on my feet, but I find myself frozen in fear. No mask to hide behind now.
“She came over today.” A croak. I sound as scared as I am.
“You invited her in?” he growls.
Every instinct is telling me I am in terrible danger now—and as though my body can sense the precariousness of the situation, my brain kicks in just in time. It can sense how much rests on this answer, and it’s telling me—screaming at me—to lie. I’m good at lying. It feels more natural to me than the truth these days. I’ve already deleted my call to Serena from my phone, in case Jack should go snooping. For that, I thank my foresight.
“I swear I didn’t. She just turned up.”
He leans forward with a long, intense look that rivals the one I was giving him earlier, as though he is trying to see right through the lies. I’ve put my mask back on just in time.
“What did she say?” That soft, low voice again that sends a shiver scuttling up my spine.
“Nothing. She just said she’d heard I was living here. She told me…well, she told me that she was Alice’s friend.”
“She was spreading lies about me, wasn’t she? And you believed her.”
I shake my head. Sharp and vehement. The frightened movement of a child. Of a woman who realizes she is utterly at the mercy of a man’s whims. Just as Alice was. He must take pity on me.
But the action doesn’t work. Or perhaps he is just so far beyond reason, he doesn’t see it. “I know you’re lying to me, Iris.” He lunges for me, grabbing the top of my arm so tight my hand throbs, blood pulsing under the skin. He drags me from the room, right up the stairs, and into the bedroom he allocated to me at the beginning. I struggle against him, but it’s useless.
“Please. Jack. I didn’t…She didn’t say anything. I’ll go back to Mum’s. I need to sort through her things anyway, figure out what to do with the house. I won’t tell anyone what Serena told me.” The desperate plea of a woman condemned. He twists my arm hard. So hard I cry out.
“I’m not going to let you go running back to your mum’s, Iris. Not now. Do you not understand the things I’vedonefor you? The lengths I’ve gone to? All for you to fuck me over like this? Your mum was quite the character, wasn’t she? Screaming like a banshee, telling me to leave you alone.”
The words land like a deadweight in my stomach. I stop struggling against him, the shock so heavy, so complete that I no longer have control over my limbs. If he is saying what I think he is saying, he’s far more dangerous than even Serena suggested. I can’t breathe, can’t even think.
He pushes me inside the room, and the fear of being trapped in here by this man sends adrenaline shooting through me. I turn, scramble desperately for the handle, but I’m too late. I hear the old lock turn in the door. “Stay. There,” he says through the wood, and then his footsteps fade away.
This was not how it was supposed to end. There were two possibleoutcomes to this evening, and this was neither of them. This room is two stories up, and when I rush to look out the window, I realize I wouldn’t survive the jump. Not without breaking bones, and, if I misjudged the angle, perhaps my skull. There’s nothing I can use to escape in here. Nothing I can fashion into a weapon. I don’t even have my phone—I left it on the counter downstairs. The door, when I wrench with all my strength at the handle, doesn’t give an inch.
I slide down it, suddenly spent. What a fucking awful way to die. No glory, no big final moment. Apart from Mick, no one who cares about me knows I’m here. Mick only cares about the person I’ve presented to him, anyway. Just like Jack. Jack has shown his true colors now. And it has become ever clearer that, whatever he felt toward Alice, it wasn’t love. Not even close. The things he’s done…the things he’s capable of doing.Mum.And suddenly, the image of Jack coming home that day when his mother was here comes to me. The panicked, haunted, wild look in his eye, as though he’d just done something terrible. Something he couldn’t take back. I feel sick.
It’s as I turn to bang the heel of my hand against the door once more—knowing even as I do that it is futile—that I see them. The marks, right at the very bottom.
