Chapter 7
“You didn’t need to dress like an actual burglar,” Kate said, eyeing Liv’s head-to-toe black outfit as she parked the car a few doors down from her old house.
“You said inconspicuous,” Liv said.
“I meant more double-glazing salesperson than black widow, but it’s fine.”
Liv shot Kate’s outfit a scathing look. “Well, you nailed the brief. I’ll have two bay windows and a replacement back door, please.”
Kate couldn’t relax enough to laugh; being back in her old neighborhood had her rattled. The cul-de-sac was deserted, as usual. It wasn’t the type of place where kids kicked a ball or rode bikes. Even the cats were indoor pure breeds, gazing at the world from the safety of upstairs bedroom windows.
She was pretty certain the house would be empty. Alice was at university, and unless hell had frozen over, Richard, never one to knowingly miss an opportunity to schmooze and show off, would be at the Geneva trade fair.
“Right, let’s be clinical, in and out as fast as possible,” Kate said, sorting her key ready to insert into the front door. “I’ll ring the bell to double-check, then once I’ve let myself in you get out and follow straight behind me.”
It worked exactly as she’d said, and she breathed a sigh of relief when the old alarm code beeped its approval.
“Trust him not to change the locks,” Liv said. “Underestimating you as usual.”
“For once, I’m glad,” Kate muttered, pausing in the hallway to recalibrate and notice unfamiliar scents, subtle differences layered across overwhelming sameness.
The paint colors she’d picked out, the furniture she’d chosen, a watercolor she’d never seen before.
There was a time when she’d loved this house, in the early days when Alice was still a child.
Now it felt like someone else’s home. Because that’s what it was.
“Come on, let’s get this over with,” she said, one hand on the balustrade.
“Shall I leave my shoes by the door?” Liv said.
Kate shook her head. Richard was a shoes-off fanatic, and the small act of rebellion felt satisfying. Upstairs, she paused by the closed master bedroom door, then couldn’t resist pushing it open.
“So clinically tidy,” Liv whispered, standing beside her. “Didn’t it drive you nuts?”
Kate shrugged. The twice-weekly cleaners Richard retained had seemed like a help at the time, but with the benefit of hindsight she could see they were paid to ensure he lived a clutter-free existence.
He’d always been someone who liked things neat and well organized; his parents were exactly the same.
The night she’d walked in on him with his secretary in that exact same room, one of the first things she’d noticed was Belinda’s mismatched underwear.
God knows how much it must have played havoc with his mood, he’d have been straight on to John Lewis to order her some expensive new matching sets.
She’d no doubt have seen it as a gift of passion, his subtle message delivered in a froth of lace and satin.
Kate clicked the door quietly shut, glad not to be sleeping in there anymore.
“In here,” she said, opening the guest bedroom door. Fitted cupboards lined the walls, and for a second she stood still and just stared at them. “Give me a minute,” she said, scanning the room. “I’m sure they’re in here somewhere.”
She’d been thinking a lot lately about the manuscripts she’d started before Alice was born.
Their mother had been creative, an artist and silversmith; the bangles she and Liv wore were her handiwork.
Both of her daughters had inherited the creative gene.
Liv expressed it through the clothes she designed and made, while Kate had always felt destined for the bright lights of the stage.
When she abruptly turned her back on that world to follow Richard to Germany, she’d found herself compelled to write instead, scripts and manuscripts, crafting words for others to perform if she wasn’t going to do it herself anymore.
She hadn’t looked at those manuscripts in over fifteen years, but something in her had made her hold on to them.
Looking after her future self, maybe. It was a phrase she’d used often when Alice was younger: “Do your homework early rather than leaving it to the last minute, look after your future self”; “Eat some healthy stuff in among the crisps and chocolate, look after your future self.” Maybe by keeping the manuscripts away from Richard’s twice-yearly shred-fests, she’d been subconsciously doing that for herself.
If she could lay her hands on them, that is.
“What are we looking for, exactly?” Liv said, ready to get stuck in. “A box covered in hand-drawn love hearts and cherubs?”
“I don’t want to go rooting through everything,” Kate said. “I’d rather no one realize we’ve been here at all.”
“We wouldn’t need to break into your own house if your ex-husband would be more reasonable,” Liv said.
Kate had considered just asking for the manuscripts but knew he’d probably have made it as difficult as possible, or even say he’d thrown them out.
“How about we go old school, sew prawns into the hem of his curtains, that’s what they always do on TV?
You know I never leave the house without a sewing kit. ”
“Do you carry shellfish too?” Kate muttered, approaching one of the cupboards. “No sabotage. It’s still Alice’s home, remember?” She didn’t love not having room for her daughter to come and stay with her, but she’d been trying to be the bigger person about things for her daughter’s sake.
She checked several identical tall cupboards before hitting the jackpot.
Richard had moved things around to group anything belonging to Kate in one place—that over-organized streak of his actually useful for once.
Hats and scarves, old handbags, and bits of jewelry.
She looked at them all with a feeling of disconnection, like an exhibition of someone else’s possessions. She hadn’t missed any of them.
“This is it,” she said, hauling a brown box from the back of the bottom shelf. Flipping the lid to check, she saw banded bundles of paper and her old laptop. It didn’t work anymore, but she’d hung on to it in case there was salvageable stuff on the hard drive.
“Can I cut holes in the pockets of all his trousers? Liv said. “Or the ends off his socks?”
Kate laughed, juggling the weight of the box in her arms. “We’re meant to be invisible,” she said.
“Moths can be so destructive.”
Kate shook her head and nodded at the wardrobe. “Close that door, would you?”
One final scan of the room and they headed back downstairs.
“Liv, come on,” Kate whispered, anxious when her sister veered off into the kitchen.
“Just one minute.”
Kate followed her sister and found her frowning into the open fridge.
“I thought there might be some champagne knocking around I could nick but there’s nothing. Maybe he’s on a health kick.”
The contents of the fridge were both scant and orderly, nothing to go off in his absence, an unopened carton of milk in readiness for his return and—“Fucking bloody revolting hummus,” Kate said, surprising both of them.
“Please tell me I can do something to it,” Liv said. “Lace it with arsenic or something?”
“Do you happen to have that in your pocket too, along with the prawns and the sewing kit?” Kate said. She wanted to get going, but a small, unwise part of her also wanted to release a little hummus-related rage. Opening the freezer, she rummaged through and came up with a bag of prawns.
“Must be Belinda’s, Richard hates them,” she said, unzipping the bag.
Liv looked delighted. “Are we actually going to sew them into the curtains?”
Kate peeled the lid on the hummus. “Nothing so drastic,” she said, tipping a good handful of prawns in and mixing them around to hide them. “Just this.”
As she put the rest of the prawns away and made sure to put the hummus back where she’d found it, Liv reached out and grabbed her arm. “Did you hear a car?”
They stood statue still and heard a car door slam on the drive.
“Shit!” Kate panicked, grabbing the brown box from the work surface. “Back door, quick.”
Thankfully, the key was in the lock, and they heard the front door open just as they slipped outside into the back garden.
“Now what?” Liv whispered, pressing herself flat against the wall.
Kate’s heart was banging behind her ribs. “Um, shed?”
They shuffled around the edge of the house, ducking beneath the kitchen window, and made a dash across the perfectly striped lawn.
“It’s the cleaners,” Kate breathed, once the shed door was safely closed. “We could just wait it out in here, they’ll be gone in a couple of hours.”
Liv’s face made it clear that wasn’t an option. “Isn’t there a back gate?”
“There is, but we’d have to leave it unlocked if we go through it. I don’t want to be responsible if he gets broken into or something.”
“I don’t know why you even care,” Liv said. “I’d stick a sign on the gate saying ‘Empty house, help yourself.’?”
“Still Alice’s home, remember?” Kate put the box down on the floor. “Right, so we either stay in the shed until they leave, or risk cutting through the house while they clean upstairs. They’re methodical, top to bottom.”
Liv checked the time on her phone. “Much as I’d love to spend the day in a spidery shed with you, I’ve a silk delivery coming this afternoon, so I vote option B. Plus, it’s more exciting.”
Kate thought she might say that. Liv’s spirit of adventure had landed her in trouble more than once over the years.
“Also,” Liv said, “they might lock the kitchen door, then we’d be stuck out here and have to climb the gate or something. I’d be all right but I don’t fancy your chances.”
“One of us was on the gymnastics team at school, and it wasn’t you,” Kate shot back, a snarky whisper even though there wasn’t anyone in the garden to hear them.
“And one of us has done Pilates for the last twenty years,” Liv said.
“You can carry that box, then.” Kate nudged it toward her sister with her foot as she quietly unlatched the door and listened. “Come on, let’s make a run for it.”
She led and Liv followed, pausing at the kitchen window to check the coast was clear. They moved in unison, a cartoon tiptoed dash from kitchen to hallway, breathless as they made it out of the front door undetected, breaking into a run for the safety of the car.
“God, I feel sick.” Kate gasped, breathing hard.
“I loved it.” Liv laughed. “Same time next week?”
“I’m never doing that again.”
They pulled away and Kate’s shoulders slowly lowered from around her ears with every passing mile.
She wasn’t kidding. That was the last time she was ever going to set foot in her old home.
Being in there just now had made her realize how much her life had changed in a relatively short amount of time.
Everything had imploded the day she’d walked in on Richard and Belinda, the ground around her littered with what felt like a series of emotional land mines.
Her stability blown, her marriage in bits, her home a shell.
She’d had her identity wiped clean, and it had taken a fair while to gather up what was left behind in the aftermath and piece herself back together.
Not the same woman, though. The old Kate would never have found herself in the middle of a publishing industry experiment or put revenge prawns in her husband’s hummus.
The old Kate had been shoehorned into a box, and only now was she starting to feel like a jack-in-the-box released.
She turned to Liv, laughter bubbling up her windpipe. “That was mad.”
“You’ve got your manuscripts, though.”
Kate nodded. She wasn’t even sure why she wanted them yet. A nebulous, unformed thought, a vague possibility. She was going to be a ghost author; was there any possibility she could finally become an actual author too?