“Hello?” comes a timid voice, as if nervous to announce his arrival.
I turn from watering the orchids on my bookshelf to see Jacob’s bearded face peering around the Crittall door.
“Hey,” I say. “Come on in.”
He hesitates and my eyes follow his to the handkerchief he’s cradling in his hands.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“I found it just outside,” he says as I go toward him. “I don’t think he’s going to make it.”
I peer into the cotton nest Jacob’s created to see a stricken bird, lying there perfectly still.
“Oh, poor thing, where was he?”
“Right outside your door,” he says, tilting his head toward the stone paving by the threshold.
“I didn’t see it when I came in,” I say.
“You couldn’t miss it,” he says. “It was right there.”
I shiver in an unconscious attempt to shrug off the menacing cloak that’s wrapping itself around me. I’ve always found dead birds to be rather sinister; I think it stems from a horror movie I saw when I was a kid and ever since, I’ve questioned their mortality. How can there be so many birds in the world and yet we see so few dead? Where do they go to die?
On my doorstep, it seems.
“It’s still warm,” he says, stepping back outside.
I wonder how I could have missed it, unless it had just happened. But how? Birds don’t just drop out of the sky.
I remember the door being ajar and feel a growing sense of unease as I watch Jacob dig in the soil with his bare hands before tenderly placing the bird, still wrapped in his handkerchief, into the hole. He comes back in with sad eyes, and dirt caked under his fingernails.
I could pretend not to notice—it seems the easiest thing to do, otherwise I’ll have to offer him the kitchen sink in the cottage to wash in. But I can tell by the way he’s holding his hands out in front of him that he’s about to ask.
“Would you mind…?” he says.
It’s crossing another line, but I force a smile and hope that the house is empty, as the last thing I need is Jacob eulogizing about how grateful he is to be living in the flat when Leon knows nothing about it. I consider telling Jacob not to mention it as I lead him up the path, but that will only unsettle him, so I decide to fly by the seat of my pants and hope for the best.
The house is still as I open the back door and I dare to imagine that Leon has already gone to work, but as I turn the tap on and silently gesture for Jacob to use it, I hear footsteps overhead. I hand Jacob a tea towel before he’s even wet his hands and head back to the door, but it’s too late; Leon is at the foot of the stairs with a surprised expression on his face.
“Oh,” he says. “Everything OK?”
I stand there, not sure what to do for the best. In any other situation, I’d normally introduce the pair of them without a second thought, but I feel compelled to get them as far apart as possible, as quickly as I can.
“We just needed to use the sink,” I say. “There was a dead bird and…”
“Oh, right,” says Leon, coming toward us with an extended hand. “Hi, I’m Leon, Naomi’s husband.”
I tense up, but force a smile. Leon will be able to sense my awkwardness a mile off.
“Jacob, good to meet you.”
I will him to leave it there and usher him toward the door.
“Thanks,” Jacob says, “for—”
“Come on,” I interject. “The clock’s ticking.”
I can feel Leon’s eyes burn into the back of my head, but I keep looking forward, intent on getting Jacob back in my office, where I get to control the narrative.
He steps inside and shrugs off his jacket, throwing it onto the coat stand.
There’s an energy about him that he didn’t have when I helped him move into the flat last week. Back then, he’d seemed almost grief-stricken, and I wondered if he was doing the right thing. If we were doing the right thing. But seeing the cigarette burns on his arms as he’d lifted a box down from the van convinced me we were.
“Why are you helping me like this?” he’d asked, as I’d hung his suits up on a rail and put his online food shop away in the kitchen cupboards.
I’d thought about it for a moment, asking myself the same question. Why did I feel compelled to cross the line of duty?
I guess the answer is right in front of me now. Jacob’s brow is less furrowed and his eyes brighter than I’ve seen them before. There’s a semblance of hope there that no matter how long I’d listened to him for, he would never have been able to muster, all the time he was going back to a woman who kicked and scratched him for not having her dinner ready on time.
“So how are you feeling?” I ask, as I go to the cabinet drawer where I know surnames beginning with M are kept.
Jacob sighs contentedly. “I can’t even begin to tell you,” he says. “It feels like a weight has been lifted off my chest. That crushing feeling that I felt constantly has all but gone.”
I’m trying to listen to him and smile, as if encouraging him to go on, but my mind is becoming entrenched in doubt and confusion. My fingers work deftly as they swipe the files back and forth, looking for the one between Langley and Mulville that I know to be here—well, at least it was a couple of days ago. Because I’d seen it—with my own two eyes—when I’d taken Melanie Langley’s folder out and briefly found myself wondering how Jacob Mackenzie, the man whose life was enclosed in the next manila folder, was doing, since leaving the wife he’d become enslaved to.
I look and look again, but it’s not here.
“I … can’t seem to find your file,” I say.
Jacob laughs. “I think you know me well enough not to need my file anymore.”
“You’re probably right,” I say, as I sit down on the high-backed leather chair opposite him. I reach for my bound notebook on the desk behind me, sighing at not being able to spot a pen.
“Here,” says Jacob, handing me his from the front pocket of his shirt.
“Thanks,” I say, taking it from him. “I’m not quite as organized as I normally am this morning.”
“It’s probably because I caught you off guard with the bird,” he says. “It’s my fault, sorry.”
I lean in and look at him. “Not everything is your fault,” I say softly. “You don’t have to apologize whenever something doesn’t quite go to plan.”
He shrugs his shoulders forlornly. “It’s force of habit, I suppose.”
“She spent a long time making you feel that way.”
“It’s funny,” he says, twiddling his thumbs. “But now that I’m out of it and with the wonderful benefit of hindsight, I can already see how messed up it all was.”
“Why do you think it was so difficult to see when you were still together?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I just think that it went on for so long, it became normal. I knew that it wasn’t right and that other people’s relationships weren’t like the one she and I had, but I think my coping mechanism was to normalize it. Or even tell myself that it was nothing less than I deserved.”
“There’s nothing you could have done that warranted her treatment of you,” I say.
“I’m beginning to see that now,” he says, his jaw tensing. “But it’s going to take me a while to get used to the fact that not everything I do will result in my getting berated, or ridiculed, or worse.”
“Are you already learning to enjoy the simple pleasures in life?” I ask. “The ones that before would have seen you get punished?”
His expression softens and his face breaks out into a grin he couldn’t stop if he tried. “I can’t tell you what a joy it is to walk down the street, without having to worry about what time it is.”
I let him continue.