Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The shameful truth is that I keep checking my phone, not for signal, not for Alex, but for the grey bubble I’m dreading.
Every time I climb the ridge and hold the phone above my head like some desperate woman in an advert, I’m preparing myself for the screen to fill with filth.
The photo. The threats. Olivia’s name in a stranger’s mouth.
I’m ready for it every single time, my stomach tight and my breath held. But every single time there’s nothing.
Just wind and sheep and one bar of signal that flickers and dies before I can use it.
Maybe he’s stopped. Maybe whatever sick little engine was driving those texts has run out of fuel. Perhaps he’s moved on to someone else, or he’s just bored with me. But losing interest is the same as being safe.
Some evenings, sitting by the fire with the wind moaning in the chimney, I can almost convince myself that the whole thing happened to a different woman in a different life.
Almost. Not quite.
Because the other silence – the one from Alex – is eating me alive.
He said he’d call. He said give me a few days, and I have.
But the few days have stretched on, and I haven’t heard his voice since he stood in this kitchen checking everything in the cottage worked and was as it should be.
I’ve sent him texts that may or may not have gone through, short functional messages – arrived safely, signal bad, Wi-Fi worse, hope Olivia ok, call when you can – and I don’t know if he’s read them.
I don’t know if he’s tried to reply and the signal’s swallowed it, or if he’s sitting in our living room staring at his phone the way I’m staring at mine, composing messages he keeps deleting.
Or maybe he’s not thinking about me at all.
Maybe he’s thinking about Ross. Maybe he’s already done something about Ross and he’s not telling me because I don’t deserve to be told.
The thought of Alex doing something rash – Alex, who has never done a rash thing in his life, who indicates at roundabouts and reads instruction manuals cover to cover – sends a shiver through me.
And Olivia. My girl. Days since I’ve heard her voice.
The missing is physical now, a dull, constant ache in my sternum that gets worse at night when the cottage goes dark and there’s nothing left to distract me from it.
I think about her at Alex’s parents’ house, eating his mum’s shepherd’s pie at the kitchen table, watching whatever she watches on her phone with her knees pulled up to her chin.
I think about her brushing her teeth in the bathroom, using a towel that isn’t hers, sleeping in the spare room with the squeaky radiator that Alex always complains about when we visit.
She’ll be fine. She’s a resilient kid, tougher than I give her credit for, and Alex’s parents adore her and spoil her rotten.
In fact, she’s probably having the time of her life.
But she doesn’t know why she’s there. She doesn’t know why her mum packed a bag and drove to Wales without explaining.
She doesn’t know that the life she walks back into when this is over might look different from the one she left, and the guilt of that – the guilt of being the person who set this in motion, makes me feel sick.
I keep busy during the day. I walk, take photos.
I clean the cottage, which doesn’t need cleaning, rearrange the books on the shelf above the fireplace, and cook meals I don’t enjoy from the supplies we bought.
I found a jigsaw puzzle in the cupboard under the stairs – a thousand pieces, a picture of Tenby harbour – and I’ve been working on it at the kitchen table in the afternoons, sorting edge pieces and trying not to think about anything except where the blue sky ends and the sea begins.
It helps, in the way that all pointless activities help when your mind is trying to eat itself. It gives my hands something to do.
But the evenings are hard.
On Thursday, the wind comes up properly.
It starts around six, a low, steady push against the cottage walls that makes the window frames rattle and sends the gate in the yard banging into its post. I wedge the gate with a stone, but it doesn’t help much because the wind isn’t coming from one direction.
It’s circling. Gusting from the west, then swinging round to the north, then dropping for a few minutes before coming back harder from somewhere else, as if the valley can’t make up its mind.
By eight o’clock, the cottage feels smaller.
The fire is lit and the curtains are open – I’ve been leaving them open in the evenings because the view of the hills and the sky is the closest thing to company I’ve got – but the glass is black now.
The wind is pressing on the panes, and the flames are jumping sideways in the grate every time a gust finds the chimney.
I can’t settle. The jigsaw gets discarded after ten minutes.
I try reading a paperback I found in the bedroom – some crime novel with a cracked spine and a missing cover – and I read the same paragraph three times without taking in a word.
I make tea and drink half of it. I stand at the kitchen window and look out at the yard, which is just visible in the light from the kitchen, and beyond it the black mass of the hill rising in front of a sky that’s only marginally less black.
This is the problem with evenings out here.
During the day the landscape is open and wide and I can see for miles, and there’s comfort in that – nothing can creep up on you when the ground is bare and the light is good.
But after dark, the same openness turns inside out.
The hills are still there, huge and empty, but now I can’t see them, and everything I could see twelve hours ago has become everything I can’t.
The darkness feels occupied in a way that daylight never does.
I stand at the sitting room window with my arms folded, my tea cooling in my hand, and I look out.
The hill is a black outline against the sky.
No moon tonight – too much cloud – but there’s a faint ambient glow from somewhere, enough to separate the ridge from the sky above it.
I can see the shape of the land, the long, slow curve of it rising from the valley, and the ragged line where the grass meets the cloud.
And then I see something else.
A shape. On the ridge. Just left of centre, where the ground crests before dropping away towards Jeff’s valley.
A dark vertical shape on the dark horizon, too upright for a sheep, not a tree because there are no trees on that ridge.
I’ve walked it four times now, and there’s nothing up there except grass and wind and a tumbledown wall.
My breath catches.
I stare until my eyes ache and the edges of my vision swim, and try to make sense of what I’m staring at.
It could be a fence post I haven’t noticed before.
It could be a section of wall I’ve only ever seen from a different angle.
It could be a trick of the cloud, a deeper patch of dark against the dark, my exhausted brain turning nothing into something because it’s spent three days wound tight and needs a threat to justify the tension.
But it looks like a person. It looks exactly like a person standing on the ridge, facing the cottage, not moving.
My pulse hammers in my throat. I press my forehead to the cold glass and cup my hands around my eyes to block the reflection from the lamp behind me, and I peer out again.
The shape hasn’t moved.
How long has it been there? Was it there when I walked to the kitchen five minutes ago, or has it appeared since?
Has it been there all evening, standing on the hill in the dark while I sat by the fire and did my jigsaw and drank my tea, and I only noticed now because I happened to look at the right time?
Who is standing on that hill?
The wind slams into the window, and I flinch backwards, slopping tea on to my wrist. When I check again, the shape is different.
Smaller, maybe. Or gone. Or just the dark playing tricks, the cloud shifting, the ridge rearranging itself the way landscapes do when you stare at them too long in poor light.
I can’t tell. I genuinely cannot tell whether I just saw a person on the hill or whether I’ve frightened myself so badly over the past week that my eyes are inventing things to be afraid of. Both feel equally possible. Both feel equally real.
I close the curtains.
I do it fast – one hand on each side, pulling them together so the black glass disappears, and the room becomes a sealed box of warmth and firelight.
The fabric doesn’t meet in the middle. There’s a gap, an inch wide, and I can see a sliver of darkness through it.
I hate that gap so much that I fetch a bulldog clip from the kitchen drawer and pinch the curtains shut.
Better. Slightly.
I wash up my mug then bank the fire. I check the front door is locked – it is, I checked it an hour ago, and the hour before that – and I turn off the kitchen light and go upstairs. Every step on the narrow staircase creaks under my feet, and the sound is too loud in the quiet.
The bedroom is cold. I get under the covers in my socks and my jumper because I can’t be bothered to change, and lie on my back staring at the low white ceiling, listening to the wind trying to get in.
I want to go home. The wanting is so fierce it makes my throat close – home, my house, my bed, my daughter’s door across the landing, Alex’s weight on the other side of the mattress, the orange glow of the street light through our blue curtains.
I want to walk downstairs in the morning and find Olivia sitting at the table with her phone and her cereal, ignoring me in that comfortable, offhand way she does on school mornings.
I want to hear Alex’s keys in the door at six o’clock.
I want the kettle and the radio and the sound of next door’s cat scratching at the fence, and I want it so badly that my eyes sting and I press my face into the pillow and let out a long breath that’s closer to a sob than I’d like to admit.
But home is where Ross knows I live. Home is blue curtains and a bedroom window someone has watched from the street.
Home is a kitchen where a man held my gaze while my family sang happy birthday, and I don’t know what’s waiting for me there – Alex’s forgiveness or Alex’s fury, a brown envelope from a solicitor or another message from an unknown number.
Or nothing at all, which might be worse than everything.
The wind pushes against the cottage. The gate bangs once – the stone must have shifted – and then falls quiet.
I close my eyes and pull the covers up to my chin. I tell myself the shape on the hill was nothing. A post. A shadow. My own fear reflected back at me by a landscape that’s too big and too dark to read.
I tell myself I’ll sleep. I tell myself I’m safe, because Alex said I’d be safe here, and Alex doesn’t say things he doesn’t mean.
But I leave the landing light on.
Just in case.