Chapter 17
That night I lay beside Tilly, thinking.
Unfortunately, as I’d let her sleep in the car so that I could think back over what Ross had said and the secret little glow I’d got from his rather diffident admission of falling for me, she’d refused to go to bed until after ten.
I was, therefore, exhausted and rather frazzled by the time she fell asleep, which made my thoughts fractured and piecemeal.
Ross would like to try to have some kind of relationship with me.
I, in turn, liked him enough to want to reciprocate.
But was it wise? I was, after all, technically still on the run and if it turned out that David had found me, what would that mean?
I couldn’t somehow see the quiet and stress-ridden Ross standing up to my confident ex, particularly if David did the whole ‘they are coming home with me’ act and gathered Tilly and me up.
Could I go to the police? Report his bizarre behaviour, the previous control and coercive behaviour and my belief about the current stalking?
Or would David bring out the actor schtick and talk his way out of it all as ‘just a misunderstanding’?
There was, after all, no proof of anything.
Apart from the texts David had sent since I’d left, everything had been unspoken.
It had been the air of menace, the little vignettes that I remembered – David holding Tilly in the night and whispering about taking her away, the tablets to make me sleep.
The always knowing where I was or wanting to know who I’d spoken to.
On their own just little symbols of caring, but taken all together a terrifying picture of a man obsessed.
How could I put Ross, with his bitten nails and anxiety eczema, in the way of all that?
I did spare a quick memory for the way Ross had been when I’d seen him in full professional mode talking to his workforce.
Smiling, jokey, encouraging rather than bullying, he was someone who got his own way through gentle persuasion rather than shouting and ordering about.
Ross was… sweet. He hadn’t tried to ingratiate himself by making friends with my daughter either, which was a tactic men had occasionally tried.
Ross treated Tilly as though she were my chaperone, to be acknowledged politely and included in conversation, but not as though she were a part of me which had to be separately wooed.
I sat up in the bed and hugged my knees. Beside me, Tilly breathed softly with her head half on the bed because Brass occupied most of the pillow, his stitched expression of near-terminal stupidity fixing me with a felt-eyed stare of accusation. What did I do?
We could run again, of course. Pack what we needed and head somewhere else, somewhere it would take David longer to find us.
Some isolated community somewhere, perhaps, in the rural depths?
I looked around our tiny room, where the shadows thrown in by the street lights highlighted how little there really would be to pack.
Most of what we had was donated and could be left with the room, for the next occupant.
I could gather what money we had, put Tilly in the buggy and buy a train ticket to as far away as we could get. Scotland, maybe?
Tilly sighed and turned over, one hand unconsciously reaching out for Brass’s floppy scales, and I wondered if I should run again.
Tilly had friends and a good nursery. She had a routine she understood, even if her mother did disrupt it occasionally by letting her fall asleep in the car and leaving her to doze uninterrupted while her feckless parent sat in a car park daydreaming about future possibilities that could never happen.
Even if David were to be hanging around in York, Tilly was in no danger.
Perhaps David would settle for seeing her and would then head back down south to leave us alone and unmolested?
Then the memories of those dark days flooded back.
David monitoring me at all times. The questioning, when I was already so tired with trying to care for a tiny baby that I barely knew my own name.
The atmosphere in the house, as though potential threat tiptoed behind me, sometimes throwing the hood of blind panic over my head.
Being followed, having to continually worry that if I went out without her someone was going to snatch Tilly and that I would arrive home to find the house empty and David and my baby gone.
David was capable of that. He was capable of taking my child, using the fact that he was her father and could provide her with the perfect upbringing to take me to court for residency.
Oh, he’d be understanding, he’d offer to let me see her ‘whenever you want, darling,’ and then he’d buy a little place somewhere in the country, inaccessible except by boat and, probably, flying unicorn…
I recognised my own hyperbole and snorted an ironic laugh, which made Tilly twitch in her cartoon-laden dreams. No.
I wasn’t going to run, not again. I’d stay here in the limited protection of the hostel and wait for him to get bored.
After all, he couldn’t really be out there; it was imagination and a tiny bit of guilt making me see him on street corners.
There were plenty of men who looked enough like David de Winter to stop my heart whenever I looked around in a crowd, but the real David wouldn’t care enough now to be still following me.
He would have shrugged off our relationship, and the only person he would be interested in would be his daughter.
She was still young enough to be influenced by him and his family money, young enough for her affection to be bought with riding lessons, daily ice cream and a bedroom with circus wallpaper.
He’d let me starve alone, but he might just try to take his daughter.
A sudden impulse made me hug the sleeping Tilly. No. No, I was her mother. While I lived and breathed, she would be with me. Her father might look like security and safety, but really, underneath it all, he was…
The darkness broke through and I cried, clasping Tilly to me while she wriggled and muttered a protest in her sleep.
Tomorrow I’d plead with Isobel. If she left Elm Cottage then Ross owed me the five thousand pounds that I could use to get Tilly and me away from here and somewhere David would never find us. Ross was… Ross was…
I drifted off to sleep with the tears of confusion stiffening my cheeks and before I could make any kind of sense of what Ross might be.