Page 97

Carly looked at the kit bag on the passenger seat. The boots. The shin pads the midfielder had lent her and she’d forgotten to give back.

“I’ll miss it.”

When Samantha spoke again, her voice was smaller than Carly had heard it in years.

“Do you want me to come?”

Carly thought about Samantha’s neat, furious stack of brochures. About Samantha in their father’s living room saying conservatory and nursing care, and their father turning the volume up.

“No,” she said. “I’ll do it.”

“Okay.” A pause. “Ring me after.”

“I will.”

She hung up and sat with the phone in her lap. Twenty minutes of figures and estate agents and Sunday roasts. They’d sorted out who would pay for the room and who would clear the garage, and neither of them had said the only sentence that mattered.

We are arranging the end of his life while he’s still living it.

Carly turned the key.

She texted Jenna at the first red light: Can’t make training. Family thing. Sorry. Jenna replied before the lights changed, a single crying emoji and we need you Lloydy!!!, followed by a GIF of a dog looking out of a rainy window. Carly dropped the phone onto her boots and didn’t look at it again.

Her dad’s house was eight minutes from the gym. She could have driven it with her eyes shut: right at the bank, left at the church, past the shops and the school with the green railings, into the street with the trees that dropped pink confetti on every car in April. Now they were bare and black against the streetlights.

She parked across the road, where she always parked, so as not to block the drive.

The house looked exactly the same. She’d half expected the decision to show from the outside: a For Sale board, a skip. But it was just the house. Red brick, white front door, the bay window lit yellow, and the hedge her dad used to trim with military precision every other Saturday, now shaggy, because nobody had the heart to do it as badly as he’d have hated.

She crossed the road and walked up the drive with her keys in her hand. She knew what she was going to say. She’d built it in the car: short sentences, facts first, the hard part early. Dad, we’ve found somewhere. It’s good. Samantha chose it. It has a garden. We need to talk about the house.

She got as far as the porch.

Screwed to the brick beside the door was a small grey box with a combination dial. The key safe. Carly had fitted it herself in the summer, with a drill borrowed from the gym and her dad watching from the window like thunder, because the carers needed a way in and he could no longer get to the door in time.

She’d chosen the code. The last four digits of his old service number.

Every evening, a stranger turned that dial and let themselves into her father’s house.

Through the frosted glass, she could see the hall light and the half-open living room door. A woman in a lilac tabard was bending over the armchair. Carly couldn’t hear the words, only the bright, cheerful rhythm people used with babies and the very old. Then a pause. Then, faintly, the effortful sound that was her father trying to talk.

The woman laughed. A real laugh, surprised, as if he’d said something genuinely funny.

Carly stood with her key an inch from the lock.

A woman whose name she didn’t know had understood her father well enough to laugh at his joke. Carly had driven eight minutes to tell him they were selling his house, and she didn’t even know what the joke was.

She looked down.

Through the bottom of the glass, she could see the row of brass hooks inside the door. Her dad’s waxed jacket. His baseball cap. And at the end, the short hook he’d put up low down, where Berkeley’s lead had hung every day since he was a puppy, so the dog could fetch it himself in the mornings.

The hook was empty.

Of course it was. The lead was in Samantha’s hall, or Carly’s car, or at Lauren’s, if things went the way the most traitorous part of Carly’s brain kept suggesting. Nobody had walked to the gym from this house since the summer. It was an empty hook on a wall. It was the most obvious thing in the world.

She couldn’t get her breath.

Inside, the telly came on. A quiz show. He used to shout the answers before the contestants could, get most of them wrong, and blame the question.