With that, I head upstairs to the spare room and bloody-mindedly send off two new query emails to rival companies.
—
It isn’t until Blue returns home that night, as I’m tidying up the kitchen before bed, that I see the collar swinging from his neck and remember the unwatched footage.
As always, watching him eat is oddly calming. I should watch the video, I urge myself, just in case. Just in case I bump into whoever it was who saw the camera and sent that message—though of course I am aware I could really do without any more drama. I am now a medicated woman. But if someone is threatening me and Blue with the police, I should probably find out who. I resolve to watch it upstairs in bed.
Finally, Blue’s soft, furry features rise from his bowl, his belly full, his meow satisfied. I bend and remove his collar and put it on charge beside the microwave.
He slurps water and ambles over as I collect my laptop and the paper pharmacy bag containing my new meds, which I’m more than a little apprehensive about taking for the first time tonight.
That said, I am even more scared of waking up in the garden, or out on the street, after wandering around unconscious in my pajamas all night.
Blue headbutts my legs, sensing my distraction.
“Yep. It’ll be fine, I know,” I agree, filling a glass with water to take up with me. “Come on—let’s go to bed.”
Once I’m safely tucked under the sheets, Blue sprawled out beside me, already half-asleep, his chest slowly rising and falling, I press play on yesterday’s video.
Chapter 18
Cat Camera
We are moving slowly alonga wall, the camera swinging from side to side. This is our street; I recognize the backs of a few houses.
A washing line, its bed sheets sailing in the morning breeze, then a garden dotted with raised beds, protected with gossamer bird-proof netting.
We reach the next garden and catch sight of a human. We are only a few houses down from mine.
We stop, sit, watch. It is a man in a sports cap, back to us, in gym gear. He is eating at a garden table, behind him the most enormous architectural glass extension I have ever seen. We rise and move closer. He is eating scrambled eggs straight out of a small Tupperware container that is raised so close to his mouth that he barely needs to fork it in, his face still partially obscured.
His back door is open. We plop effortlessly down onto his grassy lawn, and I scrub forward until Blue does the inevitable and enters the house.
We slip past the distracted homeowner, and the renovation rolls out before us, breathtakingly airy and light, the garden somehow seeming to mesh seamlessly into the vast glass back of the house. The footprint of this house is very similar to my own, though mine does not, of course, have this architectural wonder of an extension.
Blue scampers behind the kitchen island and, once safe, turns back to look out at the man.
Then I see, with a sudden bump of adrenaline, that the man on the terrace is Matt.
I sit up fast, Blue looking over at me with mild displeasure. Back on the screen I see Matt’s house, only four doors along from me—the house I walked him to with the pram—not his renovation site a few streets away.
Wait. Did Matt send me that threatening text?
No, it can’t have been. I check the time stamp; I’ve seen him since this was recorded, and he seemed fine; he even asked me out for coffee again.
Onscreen it is morning, a few hours before I met him near his second house. Matt has been to the gym, his T-shirt damp under the arms and on the chest, his skin glistening, his hair half-hidden under a cap.
He looks good—I instantly get a kick of self-admonishment, the fact that I shouldn’t be watching this beyond evident. I should fast-forward and focus on who it was who saw Blue’s collar and sent me that message.
I pause. Matt’s face is frozen on the screen. My fingers move to scrub the recording on, but instead I press play.
The camera swoops, with dronelike ease, revealing the glass extension, its jutting, unexpected angles, its experimental form. I recall Matt saying he designed it himself, and if he’d invited me in that first day we met, I know now that the impact of it would have literally stopped me in my tracks. Without a doubt, this house isa lotmore expensive than mine.
Blue scans the kitchen: a large, family-friendly double fridge; expensive, luxury cooking appliances; a mixer for making all those cupcakes with his child when she gets old enough; a steamer to get in those healthy vegetables; a state-of-the-art sound system that will no doubt pump out “Bluey” and “Baby Shark” before too long, where it once no doubt played Radiohead and Eno.
But then something snags in my mind. This kitchen is immaculate. There’s no mess here, and, more to the point, no actual baby paraphernalia, and no baby or evidence of a mother on maternity leave, just beautifully clean surfaces…not a sterilizer or bottle rack in sight.
There is actually no evidence of a family except my own imaginings of one. I look again: a fully stocked wine cooler, and inside, a raft of expensive Champagne bottles: the pop of yellow of Veuve Clicquot, the signature green-gold shield on Dom Pérignon.
