It was weird sleeping in the main bedroom without Richard there. It took me a while to fall asleep and, when I did, I had nightmares about stripping woodchip wallpaper while Richard lectured me about our ‘business values’ and a screaming baby swung off my leggings, while another sat on my shoulders, slapping the top of my head with its chubby fists.
I jerked awake in a cold sweat to hear someone moving around in the flat. I tensed up but then realised it was Richard coming home. I checked my phone and saw that it was two in the morning. He’d been gone for hours and the local pubs closed at eleven. Where had he spent the intervening three hours? My stomach clenched. The first thought that entered my head was that he’d been with someone else. With her. The other woman.
Was that what I was always going to be afraid of, forever?
Richard staggered in through the bedroom door and snapped the overhead light on. I screwed up my face and could almost feel my pupils shrinking to pinpricks under the sixty-watt assault. Richard, discarding his clothes over the floor, didn’t seem to notice that I was awake.
‘Where’ve you been?’ I asked, scrambling to turn on my bedside lamp and then heading for the main light to switch it off. The blessed gloom was a relief for my eyeballs.
‘At the pub with the boys.’ Richard was struggling to remove his shoes and I saw that he’d tracked leaf mulch into the bedroom. Ugh!
‘They close at eleven, though.’
‘Yeah…’ he said slowly. ‘We had a few beers at Rob’s after.’
‘Right,’ I said, wishing I believed him. ‘Have you had water too?’
‘Hmm? Ah, no… can you get me some, babe?’ he whined, pulling off his shoe and handing it to me as if he was tipping me with it.
I got up and collected his other shoe, dumping them on my way to the kitchen. I came back with a pint glass of water and set it on the bedside table. Richard was already in bed, wrapped up in the bulk of our duvet.
‘There you go,’ I muttered.
‘Thanks…’ He didn’t open his eyes, already sounding half asleep. ‘Turn that bloody light off, will you?’
I got into bed and switched my lamp off. Lying beside Richard as he started to snore, sweating yeasty beer into the sheets, I wondered how Mum had managed to trust Dad again. If there was a point where she’d just had to make the conscious decision to take what he said at face value. If that was the case, why couldn’t I do it? Why was I wide awake and thinking about all the things Richard might have been out doing?
It was a sleepless hour and a half later when I remembered him telling me that Rob was away in Tenerife for two weeks. My heart thumped painfully and I knew then for sure that Richard was lying to me. Again.
Chapter 27
Emma’s neat little studiowas nearer Fenlowe than Leaford, in a housing estate built back when I was still in primary school. A sweet little purpose-built village intended for families buying their first home, which had been carved up by landlords before the grass had seeded.
It was still a reasonably nice place to live but suffering a bit from decades of neglect and overoccupancy. Emma said she paid a management fee to ‘maintain the grounds’ but she had no idea where it went. As I got out of the car I nearly slipped on a crisp packet left on top of a dog turd like a festive hat. The gutter practically rattled with discarded Monster cans and the surrounding front gardens were ragged and piled with bin after bin, the only sign of the overcrowding within the houses.
Emma’s was a ground-floor place and her garden was startlingly green and lovely, compared with those surrounding it. The bordering hedge was clipped, and inside, a herb garden provided a riot of greenery, even now the weather was turning. Between the plants, Emma had peopled her garden with gnomes and fairies, mosaics of broken plates and glass, and a concrete birdbath caked in moss. It was the perfect cottage garden at the centre of an otherwise weary world.
I let myself in through the gate and up the brick path, tapping on the door. Emma opened it in a tie-dye fleece, purple leggings and Crocs studded with little crystal charms she had probably made herself. She raised her perfectly pencilled eyebrows at the sight of the pile of boxes in my arms.
‘Goodness, hon – I said bring brekkie, not start a humanitarian relief effort.’
Okay, so I might have gone a teensy bit overboard on breakfast. I’d decided on waffles with crispy sausage patties, maple syrup and a jug of banana and vanilla smoothie. That had sort of spiralled into a yoghurt parfait, freshly baked almond croissants (from frozen, I wasn’t that much of a psychopath), some bacon and egg bites and a fruit salad.
‘Well… at least you’ll be well-fed through the week,’ I said. ‘Gotta keep my best employee fuelled up and ready to go.’
She smiled, but there was a wary twist to her mouth that made me feel terrible. We still weren’t past the damage I’d done to our friendship. I planned to keep trying until I had made up for it.
Emma let me slip past her into the studio flat. I was always pleasantly surprised at how cosy it felt. I was probably just too used to the sterile chill of my own flat. Hers was hung all over the place with tapestries and her big squashy sofa was piled with huge comfy cushions and blankets. Her kitchen was spotless and warm and full of handmade pottery mugs and jars of herbal tea blends. It felt more like home than anywhere I’d ever been, except Aunt Lou’s house. And Cooper’s boat. A boat I was never going to see the inside of again, I told myself firmly.
Emma flipped the kettle switch and turned her oven on to reheat the food. We hugged and sat down at her kitchen table. There were a few late roses in a glass of water on it, pearls of dew still on them. Emma must have picked them right before I arrived.
‘How was lunch yesterday?’ Emma asked, at the same time that I said, ‘How was your date?’
‘You first,’ I said, with a smile.
‘It was fine – good. Axe throwing is fun, as it turns out. I’m not sure we really have a lot in common but sometimes that can be interesting, you know? You don’t want to be dating your twin, just someone that gets you.’ She shrugged. ‘She complimented my cardigan and I told her you made it for me – turns out she knows the shop but hasn’t ever been in. I think I might have convinced her to give us a try.’
‘That’s great,’ I said, as Emma got up to pour hot water into a pot of tea. ‘If she does, you’ll have to point her out so I can be nosy.’
