Page 18 of Don't Let Him In

The evening is soft and gentle. The champagne takes the edge off all the stress and angst I’ve been feeling about things at home. Martha’s youngest walks in. He’s wearing pajamas and is slight and fey with a shock of blond curls, just like his mother’s. He looks like the type of boy to be targeted by bullies at school. He presses himself against his mother’s side and looks at me distrustfully.

“Go on,” says Martha, “go and brush your teeth. I’ll be up soon.”

The boy keeps his gaze on me and then sighs and tuts and leaves.

Martha looks up at me. She doesn’t apologize, and I’m glad. She should not apologize for her child. Instead, she smiles and says, “Shall we eat?”

I jump to my feet. “Let me,” I say. “You’ve been busy all day.”

As I find my way around Martha’s kitchen, assembling the ingredients I brought with me, to the background of a pleasant soundtrack that she’s found for us on Spotify, I think of my kitchen at home in Reading: the sharp, hard corners of it, the plainness, those shiny white cupboard doors, the mean window overlooking the immaculate oblong garden, the metal sink, the neat rows of matching brushes and scrubbers, the cold marble tiles underfoot. I think of my wife, sitting on one of those plain wooden chairs at the plain oak table with the fabric runner down its center; all so simple, all so modern, all so soulless and cold. I don’t want that kitchen anymore; I don’t want that life. I want this kitchen, this woman, this life. My phone buzzes mutely in my trouser pocket and I pull it out.

Where are you?

I turn my phone to flight mode and tuck it back in my pocket.

SEVENTEEN

It’s snowing when Ash wakes up on Tuesday morning, a soft, lazy snow, the type that looks like it won’t settle. She stands for a few minutes at her bedroom window and watches the flakes floating past. She wants to run and tell someone: “Look! Snow!” But there’s no one to tell. She can hear her mother’s voice drifting from her study off the landing—on a Zoom already and it’s not even nine o’clock.

By the time Ash leaves for work an hour later, the snow has all but stopped and she feels a pinch of disappointment. Snow changes things, even for just a short while, makes the world seem different, a run-of-the-mill Tuesday memorable. And now she has nothing to pin this day down with in her memory, nothing to stop it feeling like yet another pointless twenty-four hours in her already pointless existence.

“I’ve been obsessively googling him,” says Marcelline when Ash walks into the shop. “Your mum’s new chap.”

“Oh,” says Ash, surprised. “What did you find?”

“Nothing much. And I did a reverse image on his profile photo. But nothing there either.”

“Do you think he’s dodgy then?” Ash asks.

“Dodgy?” says Marcelline. “No. Why would I?”

“Because you googled him.”

“Nope. Just being nosy. I google everyone. Don’t you?”

Ash shrugs. “I guess.”

She’d shown the ring to her mother that morning.

“Oh,” Nina had said. “That’s weird.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“Where did you say you’d found it?”

She couldn’t tell her she’d found it deep inside the pile of her mother’s bedroom rug whilst snooping around looking for traces of her mother’s lover. “It was on the landing outside your room, just sitting there.”

“Wow,” Nina had said, turning the ring around with her fingertips. “How did I miss that? I guess it must be Nick’s.”

“But…” Ash had paused, blinking hard enough to make black shadows in her vision. “It’s a wedding ring, don’t you think?”

“Looks like one.”

“And he hasn’t been married?”

“No. He hasn’t. Although it was only two weeks before the wedding that his fiancée died. Maybe they’d already bought their rings and now he carries his around as a memento?”

The theory was sound and Ash had nodded. “Yeah,” she’d said. “That could be it. Anyway, you should let him know you have it. He must be worried. Give him a call?”

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