Matt reaches out and high-fives me. “That’s the London spirit. That said, I would probably end up telling Chris if I was the one who’d noticed it—I see him at the gym every now and then and I’vegot terrible impulse control. Speaking of which, would you like to go on anactualdate? With me.”
I stare at his ridiculously handsome face, back-footed.
“Sorry, what?” I ask, then quickly follow up. “I mean, I thought you said you weren’t in a relationship space right now?”
He shrugs. “I don’t know. I just like hanging out with you,” he says, with a smile. “Thought I’d ask, just in case you felt the same. I feel bizarrely comfortable with you, have since the first day we met. Besides, we make a good team,” he says simply.
“Team?”
“Yeah, neighborhood-snooping team. Affair busters, or enablers, whichever, I’m easy. I don’t know—dinner tomorrow night? I’ve got a good feeling about this.”
He gestures between us in a move that I’m pretty sure would look stupid coming from anyone else.
“Okay. Yeah, let’s do it,” I say. “An actual date. And don’t you dare tell Chris any of that if you see him at the gym.”
—
When I get home Blue is not waiting for me at the back door, and suddenly I am worried for him.
As I make myself a simple dinner of cold cuts, I think about the neighbors Matt mentioned earlier, a tapestry of my street emerging. Any of those houses could contain a basement like the one I saw.
I think about all the people on the street, their lives playing out in the buildings around me.
I try not to linger too long on the idea of Lucy Kiefler, and the breakdown that has led her to take a year of her life out, and how it seems a hair’s breadth from my own story.
I can’t help but think of the blond man who is not Marina’s husband. Perhaps their argument was him threatening to tell Chris the truth, to ruin her marriage? Or could they have been arguing about something far darker?
As I wash up my plate, a meow sounds from the back door and I see Blue’s eyes reflect holographically in the half-light.
I open the door, and he cheerfully hops inside, heading straight to his food bowl.
I watch him gobble down his food and then I gently remove hiscollar, placing it on the charger, the footage landing into the app as I do.
I take my laptop into the living room and bring it up.
If I watch any of this, then I have to acknowledge thatI am stalking these people.
I stare at the new thumbnail, and its blur of greenery and wall, and it looks so innocuous, as if I might see no more than back gardens and grass. And maybe I will—what a fittingly uneventful ending to my cat camera era.
This really will be the last one, I tell myself, because in the real world, as with Matt and his niece, not everyone is hiding something terrible, and some lives really are what they appear to be.
Chapter 25
Cat Camera
My own face fills thescreen as I flick on the camera, the footage from earlier this morning.
It’s disconcerting, as unnerving as watching the sleepwalking footage, in many ways: my hair is as yet unbrushed, my pajamas baggy and unflattering, the angle of my face and intensity of my gaze not ideal, either. It’s not what I need to see after my drink with Matt.
I fast-forward until grass blurs the screen.
Suddenly we are up on the wall that runs along the back gardens. A whole other street of people. I try to follow his route, our route, as we bob and weave under branches, and over crops of climbing ivy.
On the right of the screen, I think I recognize what looks like the back of the shop at the end of our street, but then we are leaping down and through various broken fence panels until I have no idea where we have ended up.
We emerge into the back garden of a derelict building. Oil drums litter the ground and a ripped blue tarp covers an open rear section of the house.
Perhaps someone ran out of money for their refurbishment? I think of wheeler-dealer Greg and wonder if this is one of his.
