He gives me a final hug and goes back to his toast. I sit for a moment on his bed, looking at the photo of the two of us, arms around each other, bathed in sunlight. It feels like a million years ago. As I put the photo back in its place on the shelf, I can’t help feeling relieved. I was being paranoid after all; no one has been in my flat.
I’ve got to stop neglecting my clients or I’m going to start losing them, so with Henry at Sam’s I am able to finally get somewhere with Rosemary Wright-Collins’s latest project. Having Rosemary as a client is so important: without her, my business would be floundering. Sam suggested once that I was misguided to work so much for her, that having most of my eggs in one basket was a mistake. He wanted me to turn down work from her, thought I was spreading myself too thinly trying to fulfil all her requirements and keep other clients happy. He was glad my business was doing well, I am sure he was. But it’s not lost on me that he left me for someone much younger, much further down the career ladder. I know Polly thinks so.
On Friday, I pick Henry up from after-school club, and when we get home instead of plonking him in front of the telly, I play with him. We make a huge and complex track with his wooden train set and then he instigates a convoluted story where the trains have to save one of the cows from his farm set who is stuck on the line. Every time I attempt to bring the story to a close with some kind of resolution, he creates a new and apparently insurmountable obstacle that extends the game further. I watch as he pushes the little engines around the track, his face deadly serious, totally absorbed in the world we have created. It’s cosy in the sitting room, but a chill creeps over me. This is why no one must ever know what really happened to Maria. I cannot allow anything to jeopardise Henry’s innocent faith in the world as a benign place, where no one would allow a cow to be run over by a train, or take a mother from her child.
Once Henry is in bed, I sit at my kitchen table with a glass of red wine, the lamp in the corner casting a calming glow. The smell of the ready meal warming in the oven is beginning to waft through the room: onions, garlic, herbs. I scroll through my emails – the problem with working from home is that in a sense I’m always at work, unable to ever fully switch off. I open another window and go to Facebook. I’ve been checking it constantly both on my laptop and my phone, and each time there’s no message the faint hope that it’s over grows stronger. That it was someone playing a sick joke, a stupid prank – upsetting and disturbing, but no more than that. One of the school mums is spewing the details of her latest break-up on her page, but she has some of her ex’s mates as Facebook friends and they are weighing in, disputing her version of events, calling her names. I am drawn in, as I used to be years ago when I watched the soaps on TV, but with the added fascination that this is real life, or at least something like it. I’m amazed by the extent to which some people live out their lives on here. This woman doesn’t even say hello to me on the rare occasions I see her at the school gate, yet I know all the gory intimacies of her love life.
I go to Maria’s page where I can see that Sophie has now accepted her friend request, but just as I’m about to close the window, I notice that Maria has another new friend listed: Nathan Drinkwater. I turn the name over in my mind, but it means nothing to me. I’m sure there was no one of that name at school with us. I click onto his page, but there’s nothing there – no posts, no profile photo, nothing. Maria is his only friend.
There’s a group Facebook message that I’ve been included on about a night out with some old colleagues. My instinct is to do what I would normally do – ignore it and let them assume that I’m not interested, too busy with the business and Henry. But I let the mouse hover over the reply button, trying to imagine myself in a bar with a glass of wine: chatting, catching up, swapping news. I am pouring myself a second glass of wine, and trying to persuade myself to accept the invitation, when the doorbell rings. I jump, and the bottle jogs in my hand, red wine slopping down the side of the glass, pooling like blood around the base and seeping into the oak table. I put the bottle down and walk cautiously along the corridor. Even though I’ve found the photo, I haven’t totally shaken the feeling that I’m not safe, that there’s someone watching me. I haven’t forgotten the panic that surged through me as I ran through the tunnel at South Kensington. Run as fast as you like, Louise. I can see the outline of someone through the frosted glass of the front door, but I can’t make out who it is. I stand in the dark hallway, framed by the light from the kitchen behind me, my body pulsing with every beat of my heart. I take a step back. I won’t open it, creep back to the kitchen, let whoever it is assume I’m not in. But then the letterbox opens and a voice calls through:
‘Louise? Are you there?’
I hurry to the door and yank it open.
‘Polly!’
I enfold her in a hug, so thankful to see her that I hold her too long, too tightly.
‘Hey, are you OK?’
I smile, biting back tears.
‘I’m fine. Just glad to see you. What are you doing here?’
‘Um, you invited me for dinner? When I was here babysitting last Friday?’
‘Oh God, so I did. I’m so sorry, I completely forgot, what with everything…’
‘How do you mean everything, what’s going on?’
I’d forgotten for a minute that she knows nothing. Where to start? Should I even tell her anything at all?
‘Oh, nothing much, just busy with work and stuff. How are you anyway?’
‘Oh you know, same old, same old.’
We go through to the kitchen and she plonks herself down at the table.
‘Something smells nice.’
‘It’s an M&S cottage pie for one,’ I admit. ‘Sorry. I’ve got some salad and bread and stuff, we can probably make it go far enough for both of us.’
‘That’s fine, I have wine and crisps,’ she says, plonking them on the table. ‘Who needs dinner?’
She glances at the shelving unit with the photo of me and Henry back on top of it. ‘You found it then? See, I told you! I bet you just put it down somewhere and forgot, didn’t you?’
‘No, actually. Henry had it. He was taking it to Sam’s. He said he misses me when he’s there.’
‘Oh, poor H.’ Polly puts a hand to her chest in anguished sympathy.
‘I know. Let’s not talk about it, I can’t bear it.’