Chapter Six
Haze
“Mrs. Cabot!” Mr. McCabe, Bibi’s ridiculously attractive twenty-something-year-old new teacher, was waving at me from the classroom door.
I’d been hovering by the school gates, waiting for Bibi to be dispatched to me.
I now understood why I hadn’t yet seen her in the throng of children rushing out of the door. I was being summoned inside.
Fox had insisted Bibi attend the exclusive private school fifteen minutes from us because of its excellent academic record, although I think he was equally charmed by the straw boater hats they had to wear.
“So charmingly English!” Despite my scoffing, it did seem like the school was the right choice: she enjoyed going, they had good parking, and her teachers’ fixed grins were near believable.
I strode toward the teacher. “It’s just Haze!” I said this every time he addressed me, and still he refused to take it onboard. I had to hope it was down to an insistence on parental politeness and not due to the fact I was ten years older than him. “Everything okay?”
“Bibi’s fine. She’s with Miss Dutton next door. I just need a quick word with you.”
He led me through to his classroom and motioned to one of the small plastic chairs. I squeezed into one as he sat down next to me.
I had a feeling I knew what it might be about.
We compensated for our nerves about leaving Bibi for so long by embedding trackers in her school shoes.
It gave us the security of always knowing where she was, and as an added bonus, it helped us find her shoes during the morning scramble to get out the door.
The events of last year might have shaken us enough to justify the need to use a tracker, but judging by the amount of online rave reviews these devices had, we weren’t the only nervous parents out there.
There was the occasional rant from someone whining about them being an invasion of a child’s privacy, but let’s face it, she was four.
She shouldn’t have anything private from us.
It was our job as her parents to make sure we knew everything—including exactly where she was.
I didn’t know how these fancy schools worked, but if they’d discovered she had trackers planted on her, I imagined it might constitute some kind of rule breach.
Mostly because they didn’t want anyone to know that despite their brochure advertising an hour and a half a day of “daily play and outdoor activities in the expansive park opposite,” I’d clocked the most they ever managed was an hour and five minutes.
“There’s been a common theme in Bibi’s drawings this last week.” Mr. McCabe moved a pile of papers toward me.
On the top was a picture of a stick figure with long hair and a dress. Next to her was a little stick figure in what looked like penguin pajamas. Bibi had drawn herself and me. It would be adorable, except for the fact I was covered in red crayon. I looked like I’d bathed in blood.
I flicked through the pile. All varied in setting, and artistic talent, but all featured me, covered in red.
“Have you been in an accident? That perhaps Bibi witnessed?”
The Clark Dixon murder had been a disaster from start to finish.
My aim had been off. I’d sliced his femoral artery. The spray had got me. Really got me. Bibi had walked in on me in the utility room as I was stripping down. She’d screamed at the sight of her bloodied, half-naked mother.
“Gosh no! Nothing like that at all.”
Bibi had woken because of a bad dream and heard me talking to Jenny downstairs.
Just after Jenny had left, Bibi had come to find me.
I’d calmed her down by laughing off the mess I was in.
I knew she didn’t believe the excuse about a red paint can exploding while I was working.
But having shown her that I wasn’t injured anywhere, she seemed reassured that I wasn’t hurt.
She knew the story wasn’t quite right, but she didn’t know the truth.
By the time Fox had returned from doing a sweep of the street cameras, Bibi was back tucked up in bed, fast asleep. I was showered and clean.
I picked up a couple of Bibi’s drawings as Mr. McCabe watched me. She had talent. And, like her mother, blood spill clearly inspired art.
“I don’t know why she drew these. I do like red dresses.” Breezy. Cool. Normal.
Mr. McCabe frowned. “She said, ‘Mama hurt,’ when I asked her about them. Clearly she’s using her art to express her worries.” I saw his earnest expression and realized he really wasn’t going to drop this. He cared about kids’ well-being too much. I was both delighted and inconvenienced by this.
“Now that I think about it, Bibi did walk in on me as I was in the middle of changing my tampon, which had leaked all over my white nightdress.”
Mr. McCabe gulped.
“I guess it must’ve been a shock. I tried to explain about women’s monthly burden and how I wasn’t hurt, that it was all natural. But you know it’s hard to explain to a four-year-old you can be gushing blood and it—”
“Okay! Got it. Right. Okay.” Mr. McCabe shuffled the papers together. He looked even more adorable when flustered.
“I’ll talk more to her about it.” I leaned forward. “Thank you for bringing it to my attention. I had no idea it’d had such an impact on her.”
I hadn’t told Fox that Bibi had seen me post-kill, covered in blood.
I couldn’t now drop that news, along with the further bombshell that it had traumatized her to such a degree she was drawing pictures about it.
I knew keeping secrets from your other half was bad, but what about when it was for their own good?
Fox had his own issues to deal with. I could handle this.
Kids saw things they shouldn’t all the time.
There were plenty of four-year-olds who might have walked in on their parents having sex.
Bibi had just walked in on me covered in a dead man’s blood.
It wasn’t like she saw the man. Or me killing him.
In the grand scheme of parenting fails, it wasn’t that big a deal, was it?
Clark Dixon was meant to be an attempt to prove that we were getting back to normal. That even though life was getting busier, more pressured, we were still us, and we could do anything we wanted to.
But all it had done was show how far we’d fallen.
Fox was too jittery. So many worries about the abandoned warehouse Jenny had selected. Were the CCTV cameras really offline? Had we factored in the high wind speed, as that might carry noise further?
I had hoped that getting back to it would’ve triggered a primal reaction.
Reminded him of what he’d once been. But there was no spark in his eye when the knife came out.
No joy at the blood spurt. And when I handed over to him to finish, he couldn’t.
My man froze. He couldn’t perform. I pretended that I hadn’t noticed, that he was being gracious when he said, “No, darling, you do it.” But we both knew.
He’d lost his mojo, his killer instinct.
Not only was my husband not pulling his weight at home, but he wasn’t pulling it at work either.
Day to day, he looked off mournfully into the distance, questioning life.
How nice to have the time to be so introspective.
I was taking on the brunt of night feeds, laundry, nap-time logistics, household shopping.
And now I was having to do it alone out in the field too.
It was why I’d been off with my kill strike. I’d been so worried about Fox, I hadn’t aimed properly. I’d forgotten my training and I’d messed up my clothes—and also, apparently, my daughter’s head.
People don’t say it enough: marriage is hard.
You sign up to it in the throes of love, full of hope and promises and doe-eyed enthusiasm.
And then the years and years go by, and the spark is dulled.
Throw in becoming new parents, and as beautiful and life-affirming as this cherished new life is, it makes you miss your old one.
You say goodbye to passion, spontaneity, fun, and welcome in sacrifice, compromise, boredom.
Love is still there. It has to be, right? It’s just that everything else has changed. You’ve changed. For the better and the worse. It takes time to realize all this. You let it fester: the disappointment, the anger, the holy shit—is this it?
It can all bubble up to one monumental showdown—and then guess what? It’s the reset you needed.
That’s what worked for us. We had an all-time low before we found our way back. We no longer wanted to kill each other, our marriage was back on track, and we were daring to be happy, happier than we’d ever been. We were winning at marriage, winning at parenting.
But since The Incident in Italy a year ago, it had all gone to shit.
I still remembered the silent flight home, with us gripping each other’s hands.
In the months that followed, everything was a blur. We were busy trying to recover, trying to forget. I didn’t even notice when I missed a period. And then another.
Reginald Matty Cabot was a happy accident. A blessed mistake. By the time I took a test, I was already nine weeks pregnant.
Pregnancy coinciding with our self-imposed exile from the killing game seemed fortuitous timing—we didn’t want to risk further antagonizing whoever wanted us dead, and the whole getting out and about to end a man was definitely less appealing when heavily pregnant with a toddler in tow.
We had worked hard to set up this vigilante sideline, and as long as we stuck to the run-of-the-mill scumbags, we could carry on doing it.
Even though there was an element of risk to our business model, we knew we could keep our family safe.
And, in a way, if you ignored the killing bit, and focused on the “chasing your dreams” part, we were setting a good example to our children.
Reach for the stars, baby! Win that gold medal!
Be a top barrister! Climb that big mountain! Kill that bad man!
“Mama hurt.”
I just needed to work on that separation between work life and home life, make sure Bibi wasn’t emotionally scarred forever, help my husband be fighting fit, and get my baby to sleep through the night, and everything would be perfect.