Page 26

‘It is.’

‘I don’t know what he did for a job, but he must be successful. Rona was telling me a bit about it. He set up a financial firm. Something to do with supporting companies when they go public on the stock market.’

‘He hasn’t done all that well,’ Ryan said. ‘Not in the finance world. Those guys can make hundreds of millions. He was probably a small player.’

‘Maybe. But he still gave the library half a million.’

Ryan gave a snort, part unimpressed and part dismissive. ‘Anyone who goes into that field is going to make money. You don’t have to be a genius. It’s part of the territory.’

Mary shrugged. ‘I don’t know that much about it.’

Ryan was sitting more upright in his seat. ‘I mean, I chose to go into screenwriting, and managed to get something made. It may not come with the financial rewards, but that’s a much more significant achievement. Hardly anyone can do that. Anyone can do financial shit.’

‘I wasn’t comparing you.’

‘It sounded like you might be.’

Mary sighed. ‘Are you upset because he’s my high-school boyfriend? That was a long time ago.’

‘No!’ There was a strangled sound in his voice. ‘Of course not! I’m just saying that there’s more to life than money! Whereas you seem to be all wide-eyed and star-struck because someone has half a million dollars. It’s not even that much!’

‘I know there’s more to life than money,’ she said. ‘And I’m proud of what you achieved.’ But where’s the next one? she wanted to add. I don’t see much else in the pipeline. I’ve not even seen the first one. Sometimes I wonder whether it even happened.

She kept her lips sealed and turned into the driveway. Any prospect of an early night in the sense Ryan had meant was now over.

‘He’s a nice guy,’ she said. ‘And he’s done well for himself, that’s all. You have nothing to worry about.’

He stared ahead. ‘I’m not fucking worried. I can’t believe you think I am. Worried? By that loser?’

He laughed, then opened the car door and climbed out.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘That’s good.’

She watched him trying to open the front door, fumbling the key in the lock, and closed her eyes.

That weird note, then Ben Cox, then her negative, toxic daughter and now a drunk and offended Ryan.

Had it really been only one day?

She closed her eyes. It had. But at least it was over.

Someone Else Had

Otis was sitting on the couch, staring at his phone. He barely looked up when Mary put her head around the door. He was watching – if that was the word – a ‘reel’, some inane, brain-rotting so-called content designed to give you a quick dopamine hit before you scrolled mindlessly to the next video. She felt a prickle of anxiety at the thought of what she – and everyone else – were doing to their kids by letting them be the subjects of a mass experiment in the effects of social media.

She took a deep breath. The prickle could quickly become a forest fire.

When Sally was a newborn Mary had suffered – and suffered was the word – from constant anxiety: each day she had woken up, and for a brief moment, everything had been OK, if by OK you meant blank, because for that brief moment her emotions had been an empty space. It did not last. The space was soon filled by an overwhelming sensation that something was wrong, badly wrong, which left her wide-eyed with a nameless, non-specific fear, her heart racing. She was certain that she would not even be able to get out of bed and begin looking after her newborn daughter and toddler son, never mind get through the day.

Never mind get through her life.

It became a doom loop: her anxiety crippled her, her fear of it made her anxious. There was no escape. And she needed an escape.

She couldn’t live with it. And since it was all she thought about it began to seem the only way to stop it was to stop her thoughts themselves. To cease thinking. And the only way to do that was – she had fought hard not to let herself get too far down that chain of reasoning.

But she could not stop herself. For the first time in her life, and she was shocked by it, suicide was not something that happened to other people. It was an option.

She had put it down to sleeplessness and stress and just being a parent stretched too thin – all of which were contributing factors, no doubt – but, finally, she had realized she needed help. With a combination of therapy and medication she had clawed her way out of it.