To the phone lying face down on the table.
Mark has Heath.
I have a flight on Wednesday.
And somewhere between those two facts, something has started to hurt.
Chapter 15
Mark
By the time Iget back to Islington on Sunday afternoon, Heath has survived family lunch by what I can only describe as sheer spite.
I carry the cage into the kitchen, set it carefully on the table, and peel off my jacket.
He remains buried inside the beanie.
Motionless.
Emotionally bankrupt.
“Dramatic,” I inform him.
No response.
Fair.
The house is quiet.
Not unsettlingly quiet.
Just my usual kind of quiet.
Orderly.
Controlled.
A place where everything sits where I left it and nobody hums One Direction while poaching eggs.
I stand still for a second.
Then immediately wish I hadn’t.
Because now all I can hear is the absence.
Excellent.
I drop my keys in the bowl by the door and lean on the counter.
Sunday lunch at my parents’ had started innocently enough.
Mum had cooed over the hamster like I’d arrived with an orphaned infant.
Dad had asked whether hamsters bite.
Tom had wanted to know if this was some kind of delayed psychological event.
My eldest brother, Daniel, had looked at the cage and said, “You picked up a rodent with the bloke?”
