Page 81 of The New House

A beat passes.

Millie is many things, but she’s not a coward.

‘You think she’s setting me up,’ she says. ‘You think she manipulated me into killing her husband for her, and now she’s making sure I get blamed for it.’

That’s exactly what I think.

Millie puts her wine glass downand goes back into the hall. I watch as she puts her coat back on. ‘Where are you going?’ I ask.

‘To find out,’ Millie says.

chapter 48

millie

‘Where are you going?’ Tom asked.

I threw my school bag onto the passenger seat of my mother’s clapped-out black Fiat Uno. ‘To find out,’ I said.

‘Millie, you’re sixteen! You can’t drive!’

‘Of course I can drive,’ I said. ‘You mean I can’t drivelegally.’

‘At least let me come with you—’

‘You’ve got an exam this morning, Tom. You can’t miss one of your GCSEs. I don’t have anything till Chem this afternoon and I’ll be back way before then. He’ll still be sleeping it off till lunchtime anyway. I’ll be fine.’

Tom held onto the sill of the open car window, as if he could physically prevent me driving away. ‘Millie, if your mother’s gone back to him, you won’t be able to stop her.’

‘She can’t,’ I said fiercely. ‘Not this time. I’m not going to let her.’

It had taken a spiral fracture of the radius and ulna of her left arm, a broken clavicle and the loss of both her front teeth to do it, but a month ago she’d finally walked out on my father. For good, she’d said. I hadn’t believed her at first: we’d been here too many times before. I’d watched her curled up on her bed at the shelter sweating like an addict going through withdrawal as she fought her longing to call him, certain it was only a matter of time beforeshe went back. But somehow, against all my expectation, she’d resisted the urge and stuck it out. After a week at the shelter, we’d moved into a small rented flat in the anonymous sprawl of Crawley, a grey, unlovely London overspill town thirty minutes from my school. She’d talked about getting a job. She’d promised me it’d be different this time. Stupidly, I’d dared to believe her.

And then that morning I got up to make breakfast and found she’d gone.

She’d broken down and called him while I was sleeping and he’d come and stolen her away from me like a thief in the night.

She’d left me behind, because she’d known I’d have stopped her, even if I’d had to tie her to a chair. She didn’t care I was in the middle of my exams, or that I was only sixteen and there was no money or food in the house. She was anaddict. She couldn’t help herself.

My father answered the door with a swagger. ‘I knew you’d come crawling back,’ he said.

‘Where is she?’

‘Where she belongs.’

He turned and walked back into the house, so confident he had the upper hand he didn’t even bother to shut the door on me.

I found my mother in the kitchen, sitting at the table in her apron as if she’d never been away, stringing runner beans into a pink plastic bowl.

‘Youpromised,’ I said.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said, her eyes sliding towards my father. ‘He’s my husband. I love him. And he’s changed. It’s going to be different this time.’

‘You said that last time, when he broke your wrist. And the time before, when he broke your nose.’

‘Your dad’s stopped drinkingnow—’

‘And the time before that, when he brokemynose. And the time before that, and the time before that—’

---