Chapter 31
Chapter Thirty-One
For the first time since Alex drove away, I feel almost normal.
The fire is lit. The curtains are drawn – pinched shut in the middle with the bulldog clip, no gap, no sliver of dark glass staring back at me.
I’ve got the lamp on and the overhead light off, which makes the sitting room feel smaller and warmer, like a den, like somewhere safe.
On the table there’s a cup of tea, a packet of crisps, a bar of Dairy Milk I bought in town this afternoon, and a bowl of pasta I made with actual effort – garlic, tinned tomatoes, dried chilli flakes I found in the back of the cupboard.
It’s not exactly a Nigella spread, but I ate it at the table with a fork and a glass of water and I didn’t cry into it.
At this point, I’m counting that as a win.
I found a DVD player under the television.
There’s a shelf of films beside the bookcase – a strange, mismatched collection that must have been left behind by years of different guests.
Romantic comedies, a couple of thrillers, a David Attenborough box set, something French with subtitles, and a battered copy of The Holiday that’s been watched so many times the case is cracked.
I go with The Holiday because it’s easy and I’ve seen it enough times that I don’t need to concentrate.
And because Cameron Diaz crying in a cottage on her own feels uncomfortably relatable right now, and I’d rather lean into it than pretend I’m above it.
The film starts. I tuck my feet under me on the sofa, break off a row of chocolate, and let the opening scenes bombard me.
My shoulders come down from where they’ve been living near my ears for the past week, and I breathe.
The fire sizzles, and the cottage feels – for the first time – like somewhere I’ve chosen to be rather than somewhere I’ve been put.
It’s only three days till Alex arrives, and I’m wondering if the worst of this is behind me.
We’ll sit down together, call the police to file a report, and it’ll be handled, dealt with, sorted, and I can start the long, slow work of earning back my husband’s trust while the professionals deal with the man who tried to destroy it.
Maybe.
I eat another square of chocolate and watch Kate Winslet arrive at Cameron Diaz’s house in Los Angeles and marvel at the size of it.
Tomorrow I could borrow the car again and try to call Olivia from town.
We could talk about the trainers, the hamster, and whatever else she’s been up to at Alex’s parents’ place.
She’ll tell me I’m being clingy, I’ll tell her I’ve missed her, and she’ll say ‘Mum, it’s been like a week’ in that tone she does, as if a week is nothing, and mothers aren’t supposed to fall apart when their daughters aren’t in the next room.
Jeff’s car keys are on the kitchen worktop.
He turned up at the cottage this afternoon with a spare set of keys and told me to borrow the car whenever I like – No rush, love, bring them whenever, I barely drive the thing these days, just take it if you need it.
I left them by the toaster where I can see them, because knowing the car is parked in his yard and the keys are in my kitchen makes me feel something I haven’t felt since I got here.
An exit. A way out. If something goes wrong, I’m not stuck.
I can walk over the hill and get in the car and drive, and that single fact – the existence of a plan B, however rough – has taken the edge off the isolation in a way that five days of walking and deep breathing and talking to teapots never managed.
I’m halfway through the film when the headlights hit the window.
They sweep across the curtains in a wide, slow arc – two beams of white light that travel from left to right across the fabric and throw moving shadows over the ceiling and the far wall.
Then they’re gone. The room drops back to firelight and lamplight and the bluish flicker of the television.
I sit completely still with a piece of chocolate halfway to my mouth and my heart slamming against my ribs.
A car. On the track outside. Just after nine at night.
I put the chocolate down. I mute the television. The room goes silent except for the fire and the blood rushing in my ears, and I listen.
An engine. Low, idling, close – just outside the yard, maybe on the track, maybe already through the gate.
The steady hum of an engine seeps through the stone walls.
Nobody comes down this track, especially not at this time of night.
It’s a dead end. The cottage is the only thing at the bottom of it, and Jeff is the only person who knows I’m here.
But Jeff goes to bed at nine, Jeff doesn’t drive at night, and Jeff wouldn’t pull up outside without knocking.
Who is outside my cottage?
I get off the sofa. My legs feel strange – too light, disconnected from the rest of me – and I move to the window and press myself to the wall beside it and reach for the edge of the curtain. My fingers are shaking. I pinch the fabric and draw it back an inch, just enough to see through.
Darkness. Total, blank, black darkness. The headlights have gone.
The engine has stopped. There’s nothing in the yard except the gate, the wall, and the black shape of the hill beyond.
I can’t see the track because it curves away to the left and the cottage blocks the angle.
Wherever the car is, it’s not where I can see it.
I drop the curtain. My hand goes to my chest, and I press it flat to my sternum as if that might slow my heart down. I stand in the sitting room with the muted television flickering, the fire popping, and my breath coming in short, shallow pulls that I can’t seem to deepen.
Maybe the driver is lost. A car that took a wrong turning, came down the track, and they realised it was a dead end and reversed out.
That happens. Even here, in the middle of nowhere, people make wrong turns.
Satnav sends them down lanes that don’t lead anywhere, and they curse and do a three-point turn and go back the way they came.
That’s all this is. A wrong turn. A lost driver. Already gone.
But the engine stopped. I heard it stop.
A lost driver doesn’t stop – a lost driver reverses, or turns, or at the very least sits there with the engine running while they check their phone.
This car drove up, switched off, and went dark, as if whoever was driving it had arrived where they meant to be.
Then I hear the footsteps.
Not loud. Not heavy. Just the soft crunch of shoes on gravel, coming from the side of the cottage – the left side, where there’s a narrow gap between the wall and the fence that runs along the field boundary.
The sound moves slowly. Deliberately. One step, then another, then a pause, then another, as if the person is feeling their way along the wall in the dark, or stopping to listen at each window.
My legs go cold. The blood drains out of them so fast it feels like the floor has tilted.
I take a step backwards from the window, and my hip catches the arm of the sofa.
I grab it to steady myself, and the crisps fall off the table and hit the rug with a soft crackle that sounds deafening in the silence.
The footsteps stop.
I hold my breath.
For five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen, nothing moves.
The fire ticks. The television throws blue light across the walls.
Outside, the wind pushes at the windows and dies and pushes again.
I stand in the middle of the sitting room with my hand on the sofa and my mouth open and my gaze locked on the front door at the end of the hallway.
The footsteps start again. Closer now. Heading along the front of the cottage, past the window box, past the drainpipe that gurgles when it rains. Coming towards the door.
I should do something. I should call someone – Alex, the police, Jeff, anyone.
My phone is on the kitchen worktop next to the car keys, but the phone has no signal, I know it has no signal, I’ve checked it a hundred times.
The Wi-Fi. I could try to get the awful Wi-Fi going and message Alex. I could email. I could—
The door handle goes down.
Not a knock. Not someone calling out, not a hello, anyone home?
, not the polite rattle of a visitor who’s trying to work out if the place is occupied.
Just the slow, firm depression of the handle – down, held, tested – and then the faint resistance of the lock catching, and then the handle releasing and going back up.
Silence.
I’m standing six feet from the front door.
The hallway is narrow and dark – I didn’t turn the hall light on – and I can see the door, the frame, the handle.
The bolt is across. I slid it when Jeff left this afternoon, the way I do every evening, top bolt and bottom bolt and the main lock.
It felt excessive at the time, and now it’s the only thing between me and whoever is standing on the other side of that door.
The handle moves again. Down, hold, release. As if the person is confirming what they already suspected – that the door is locked, that I’m inside, that I know they’re there.
My hand is over my mouth, my breath hot and fast against my palm, my pulse in my ears, not beating but roaring, a sound so loud I’m terrified the person outside can hear it, too.
Then nothing. The handle doesn’t go down again. The footsteps don’t resume. The wind blows, the fire crackles, and the television throws its silent blue light across the wall. I stand in the middle of the cottage with my hand over my mouth and my back against the sofa, and I wait.
I wait for a knock that doesn’t come. I wait for a voice that doesn’t speak.
I wait for the sound of the car starting, or footsteps retreating, or anything that tells me the person has gone, and I get nothing.
Just silence. The huge, pressing, terrible silence of a place where nobody lives for miles and nobody can hear me if I shout for help.
I don’t know how long I stand there. It could be five minutes.
It could be thirty. At some point my legs give out and I slide down the sofa and sit on the floor with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them.
The muted television plays on above me – Kate Winslet and Jack Black in a video shop, laughing, falling in love, a thousand miles away in a world where the worst thing that can happen is a broken heart.
The car keys are on the kitchen worktop. Jeff’s farmhouse is over the hill. The phone has no signal.
I sit on the floor and I stay still and I don’t sleep and I watch the front door until my eyes burn.
The handle doesn’t move again.
But nobody drives away either.