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‘Was he unhappy here? Tell me again, what exactly did he say?’
‘Just what I told you before. Nothing else. It’s my bad. I should have questioned him more and tried to get to the bottom of it. I’ve been a terrible friend.’
Patrick’s phone pings. He ignores it and it pings a few more times.
‘Get that if you want,’ she says.
‘No, it’s okay.’ He takes the phone out of his pocket, mutes it and puts it face-down on the table without glancing at the screen to see who’s calling.
‘What shall we do tomorrow?’ he asks.
The question takes her by surprise; it’s as if they’re on holiday.
‘I’m exhausted. I don’t think I can think about it until the morning. I might go to bed.’ She wants some time alone. It’s tiring talking to him, trying to read him, trying to figure out if the last year of her relationship has been a lie.
‘No worries. You go ahead, I’ll finish up here.’
‘Thanks for dinner.’
He looks away from her briefly, as if bashful, and nods. Has he still not learned to take a compliment? It’s a welcome glimpse of his childhood self and as usual this makes her feel a twinge of affection for him. There’s the Patrick I know, she thinks. Tom’s friend. Your friend. She values loyalty. And where are her so-called friends or Tom’s other mates? When push has come to shove, Patrick has turned up to help her.
Still, it’s a relief when she shuts her bedroom door behind her. The bedroom is gloomy, the cliffs outside invisible now. She can only see an oblique patch of lawn, off to the side where the light from the living area lands crisply on the grass.
The blinds won’t descend when she asks them to so she doesn’t bother to turn the bedroom lights on but undresses quickly in the bathroom, brushes her teeth and falls into bed where she sits, propped up against a bank of pillows, and stares out, clutching a handful of sheet to her chest.
Her thoughts are jumbled and distressing; scraps of grief, fragments of memory that she can’t help scouring for signs that Tom was depressed but still finds none. Eventually, her eyelids become heavy, and she slips into sleep as if it were drug-induced.
Waking, she’s disorientated. There is shouting. She is still propped up in the position she fell asleep in. Her mouth is dry. Her heart thumps. ‘Hello?’ she tries to call out, but her voice is barely more than a whisper. ‘Patrick?’ she says, but so quietly that he probably wouldn’t hear her even if he was in the room.
It’s a man’s voice she can hear, and it sounds like Patrick. He’s very angry, but his words are indistinct. She gets out of bed and stands, riddled with anxiety, in the middle of her bedroom, unsure what to do. Would it be better to hide? Has someone broken in? Is Patrick confronting them? Wouldn’t the house security system have gone into action if someone was here who shouldn’t be? Or would it? She looks for her phone, thinking to call 999, but she must have left it in the living area.
Her hands are shaking. The shouting stops and the quiet that follows is almost more frightening. She remains standing, as still as her body will let her, and counts slowly to one hundred. By the time she’s finished the silence seems to have settledpermanently like a blanket over a bird cage and it feels safe enough to move.
She’s only taken one step towards the sanctuary of her bed when she hears the slightest of noises outside the bedroom door. Her head whips round in time to see the door handle turn and she screams.
28
FIVE YEARS EARLIER
Anna’s Journal
A terrible thing happened and it’s my fault. Sasha finished giving me a private yoga session and was dashing to teach a class and she gave me her necklace to look after. ‘I forgot to take it off,’ she said. She doesn’t like to wear jewellery when she teaches the public; she prefers to look impersonal. ‘Can you please put it somewhere super-safe?’
‘Of course,’ I said. I recognised the necklace. She’d inherited it from her mother and I knew it was precious to her, so I took it into the kitchen and put it inside a small bowl that lives on a high shelf on the dresser. Kitty was peeling potatoes at the sink. ‘I’ve put Sasha’s necklace in the Spode bowl,’ I told her. ‘Hmm,’ she said. She barely seemed to pay attention.
After class, Sasha was tired. I made a pot of mint tea and put it on the kitchen table with some cups. I don’t make a fussof serving it to her these days; I just make sure it’s there. She came in and sat down and I busied myself at the kitchen counter so she wouldn’t think I was hovering. I love talking to her after class, hearing about how it went and who did what. ‘Have some tea with me,’ she said, and I felt pleased. We talked about the afternoon and about what was planned for tomorrow. ‘Where did you put my necklace?’ she asked, her hand on her chest. I went to retrieve it, but the bowl was empty.
‘Have you seen the necklace?’ I asked Kitty.
‘No,’ she said. ‘What necklace?’
‘Sasha’s necklace. I told you I was putting it in here for safekeeping.’
‘You didn’t.’
‘I did. You saw me put it in here.’
She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Anna, but I didn’t.’ Sometime since Olly and Sasha moved in, she’d stopped calling me Mrs Creed and started calling me Anna. I wanted it that way because we felt more like a family.
