AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Oh, you can come teach. I go with other au pairs.’
Rob looks up from the table, where he’s been rooted since chatting with the girls while they ate. The look he gives me is a warning:you’re not going anywhere.
‘Another time,’ I tell Natalia. ‘How did you get on at your English class earlier?’ I ask, sensing she’s about to head upstairs to her room to get ready.
‘Is good,’ she says. ‘We learn about different words who mean same.’
‘Like pool and pool?’
‘Exactly. And they’re, their and there. It drive me crazy.’ She pulls a face and pretends to tear out her cropped hair.
‘I like the pink,’ I say, noticing she’s added a subtle tinge to its colour. ‘Oh, there’s another one. Hair and hare.’
She looks puzzled, so I touch my hair then google a picture of the animal on my phone to show her. Just as she’s looking at the screen, a message pings in from Jack…Darren.
I whip it away, feeling my cheeks burning up. I fumble my phone into my back pocket without reading it and clatter the dishwasher closed, turning it on. When I look round, Natalia is gone. And, to my horror, so is Amber.
‘Finally,’ Rob says, staring across the kitchen at me. I’m standing behind the island, wishing I was alone on one right now. He gets up and goes to close the kitchen door, but then thinks better of it and slips out, making me melt from relief. But before I can even gather my thoughts, he’s back. With the folder in his hands. He slaps it onto the island worktop. ‘Are you going to explain?’
My mind is blank. Literally nothing there. No smart comebacks or convoluted stories or lies or…anything. I’m empty.
‘I…’ is all I say. ‘I…’ I manage to shake my head, then hang it.
‘What the hell, Hannah? This is serious shit. And you think it’s OK to hide them away and not tell me?’
I have no idea if he’s had the bottle to look through all the photographs in there, including the very last one in the folder. Surely, after getting an eyeful of even just one picture of our daughter posing like that, he’d have had the decency to stop.
‘I didn’t know what to do,’ I tell him, which isn’t far from the truth.
‘Where did you get them?’
I shake my head.
Then, to my horror, Rob opens the folder. One by one, he spreads out the photographs of our daughter. He grabs my chin and angles my face down so I have to stare at them. I screw up my eyes.
‘You changed the code on the safe. Youwantedto keep them from me. While our daughter is being…groomed, or something equally horrific, you think it’s OK just to ignore it, to let this happen to Belle?’
It’s the only time I can honestly say I’ve wanted to yell at Rob that she’smydaughter, not his, and actually mean it. That her welfare is nothing to do with him; that he should back off and let me deal with it my way. Literally, the only time. From the moment he first met Belle, that time in the park and then at the bank, they were drawn to each other. He’s always treated her like his own.
He’d called me later that afternoon on the grubby communal phone in the lodgings where I was renting a room – the number I’d given on my bank account application. Usually no one ever bothered to answer it, including me, and it rarely rang anyway. But I happened to be struggling in the front door with Belle’s buggy just as the thing rattled out its ring on the wall.
‘Hello?’ I’d said, my arms breaking with several bags of shopping as well as my daughter latched to my hip. I wasn’t able to lift everything up the stone steps of the building in one go and had just gone back for the buggy. I dumped the shopping on the floor before it fell.
‘Is that Hannah Greene?’ he’d said. It was still my instinct to say no. Fleeing London still felt too much like the recent past, even though it had been a while since we’d left. I often found myself looking over my shoulder, making sure I wasn’t being followed, being cagey with my details.
‘Who’s calling?’ I’d replied cautiously.
‘It’s Rob. Rob Mason from the bank.’
‘Oh, hi,’ I’d said, thinking there must be something wrong with my account. I’d deposited a hundred pounds in cash to open it, though I was wondering if he was going to grill me about where the rest of the money he’d spotted was, if he’d somehow got wind of the tens of thousands I still needed to put in. I knew I couldn’t do it all at once.
‘There’s just one more thing I need from you, actually,’ he’d said.
‘Is there a problem?’
‘Only if you say no.’
It was obvious he was nervous, but I wasn’t sure about what.
