Page 38 of The New House

‘If Felix has lost his job, surely selling the house would be—’

‘I’m adirector,’ Felix says again. ‘My assets are up for grabs.’

‘It’s the company that’s going bust, not you,’ I snap. ‘Your home should be legally protected from creditors.’

‘Not necessarily,’ Felix says.

‘What does that mean?’

Stacey looks nervously at him, and then back at me. ‘It means they can come after your personal assets if they can prove wrongful trading,’ she says. ‘I’m sure it’ll all be fine in the end, because obviously Felix hasn’t done anything wrong,’ she adds hastily. ‘Obviously. But his lawyer says it’s a lot harder to make someone homeless than it is to seize a pile of cash sitting in a bank account. He says we shouldn’t sell the house till this is all sorted out.’

‘You could transfer it into Stacey’s sole name,’ I tell Felix. ‘Your creditors couldn’t come after the money then.’

‘It’d still be a marital asset,’ Stacey says.

Felix gives me a cold stare. I imagine slicing neatly around his eyeballs with my scalpel and pocketing them, like marbles.

As if conjured by my ill-wishing, a sudden gush of blood bursts from Felix’s nose. He tilts his head back and gropes around for something to staunch it as he pinches the bridge of his nose. A light spray of blood spatters the counter and my running shoes.

‘It’s the stress,’ Stacey says, her tone oddly flat. ‘He often gets nosebleeds.’

There’s a tea-towel on the kitchen counter in front of me and I hand it to him.

‘Lean forward and breathe through your mouth,’ I say. ‘It’ll drain blood into your nose instead of down the back of your throat.’ I open the freezer compartment of their shiny American refrigerator and rummage for a bag of peas. ‘Take this. It’ll help stop the bleeding.’

‘Fuck this,’ Felix says, waving me away.Duck dis. ‘I’ll be in my study.’

We listen to his footsteps recede downstairs.

Stacey suddenly reaches across the kitchen island and seizes my forearm so tightly her nails dig into my skin.

‘Don’t believe him,’ she says urgently. ‘Please, Millie. This has nothing to do with him losing his job. He won’t let me leave. You have to help me.’

chapter 24

tom

I can’t say I’m sorry about losing the Glass House.

Millie’s upset, of course, but the prospect of that huge mortgage was already giving me sleepless nights, and it’s a lot of upheaval to put the kids through just to move a dozen streets away from where we are now. The last thing Peter needs is any more disruption.

And now that herdream houseis off the table, maybe Millie will stop obsessing about Stacey Porter—

Some hope.

I’m not sure what it is about her friendship with Stacey that sets off alarm bells. The woman seems nice enough, though it’s hard to know how much of that is a carry-forward from her cuddly, approachable screen persona. But her friendship with Millie has gone from nought to sixty in thirty seconds: it’s the intensity of it that makes me uneasy. Something about their relationship just feels overheated, the emotional equivalent of a housing bubble. My wife can be very focused when she gets her teeth into something. Very determined.

Given her personal history, it’s not surprising Millie has a hair trigger for domestic violence. She’s got zero tolerance for any kind of physical abuse: quite rightly, of course. I’ve rarely seen her lose her temper, butwhen she’s confronted by any kind of violence or bullying – of defenceless animals, children, other women – it’s like red mist descends and some external force takes over. Herdark angel, she calls it. I honestly think when it happens she’s capable of pretty much anything. And I can feel her champing at the bit to go into battle on Stacey’s behalf.

Maybe I was wrong to put an end to her prison breaks. Perhaps she needs more than her wistful visits to other people’s houses.

Maybe we both do.

I’m not going to lie: I miss the thrill I used to get when she’d come home from one of her extracurricular adventures. We never discussed the specifics of what she did when she was away – we didn’t need to. She’d return with a certain look in her eye: a lightness, like a brand new leaf under the sun. As if whatever fever had consumed her had abated, at least for now. She’d be gentler in bed, and more kind out of it. I miss that Millie.

My phone vibrates on the table, jerking me from my reverie. I glance at the screen, and then flip the phone facedown and cover it with the café menu.

Harper must have called me a dozen times in the past few days. It’s my own stupid fault: I don’t know what I was thinking, letting myself get sucked into – well, I’m not exactly sure what it was. Let’s call it a middle-aged man’s foolish ego trip and leave it at that.

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