The Girlfriend by Michelle Frances
PROLOGUE
Monday 2 March
I love my son. That was all that counted. It didn’t matter that she was about to do something heinous. An opportunity had been granted to her, a beacon of light through the devastating last few months, and Laura knew she had to take that opportunity. She’d agonized over it for hours, but now the decision was final, she felt a wave of terror at what she had to say. The words that were going to break her into pieces. This was the first time. She briefly considered rehearsing it, but the words – the word – wouldn’t form properly in her head; her instinct was to bat it away violently.
Crossing to the sink in the en-suite bathroom just off his private room at the hospital, she looked at herself in the mirror hanging above. A brief check that her soul was still intact through her worn blue eyes reassured her. No flashing green irises, no demonic pinhole pupils. She looked tired, though, and was shocked to see how much she’d aged. There were more lines around her eyes and mouth. There was also a sadness, a haunting despair, which she had desperately tried to keep at bay with this new, expensive hospital, the best doctors she could find and brittle hope. For a moment she forgot about what she was going to do and thought only about what was soon to happen. The heartbreak was a physical force that made her double over, clutching the sink. After a few seconds, she stood. Nothing had changed.
Cherry was back today. Laura had checked and flights from Mexico usually arrived at Heathrow early in the morning. She looked at her watch. Maybe she’d be back in her flat in Tooting by now.
A lump formed in her throat as she held her phone, but she swallowed hard. She had to get this right. Any mother would do the same, she reminded herself again and again, a mantra to get her through it.
She dialled the number carefully. She went cold then clammy in alternate waves, buffeted around by her agony. Her life was soon to end. The life that had meaning. Holding the phone with two hands to stop them shaking, she waited for the rings in her ear to be terminated.
ONE
Nine months earlier – Saturday 7 June
Laura had a good feeling about today. A delicious start-of-the-holidays sensation had embraced her the minute she opened her eyes. She was up and dressed before it was even seven thirty on an already hot Saturday in June. Walking along the landing to Daniel’s bedroom, she listened out for sounds of him stirring, but the room that they kept clean and welcoming while he was at medical school was silent. He was still asleep. Hardly surprising seeing as he’d come home long after she’d gone to bed the last couple of nights. Daniel had been home from university for two whole days now, but she’d not yet seen him. Work was at a pressure point and she left early in the mornings, and he was out when she came home. Catching up with old friends, no doubt. She was envious of those conversations, hungry for information. She wanted to hear everything, soak it all up, enjoy the excitement she felt for him just starting out in his professional life and relish the summer with him before he went off to do his Foundation Programme. Today was their day – no last-minute urgent changes to the drama series she was producing for ITV that kept her in an edit suite until nine o’clock at night, no meetings, just a day together, mother and son.
She opened the door a crack, the smile ready on her face. The room was flooded with sunlight, the curtains wide and the bed made. She stopped there for a moment, confused, then realized he must have gone down to make breakfast. Glad that he was already up and about like her, she hurried excitedly down the stairs of her Kensington house and burst into the kitchen. It was empty. She looked around, a little lost, a pang of anxiety fluttering through her. Then she saw a piece of notepaper on the counter. Scrawled on it was a message: ‘In the basement. Will be HUNGRY!’ She smiled. He knew she hated it to be called the ‘basement’: the word rang with false modesty. It was a ruddy great extension that went vertical instead of horizontal and had cost her husband a fortune. Still, it was no worse than what he called it. Howard had wanted a ‘den’, he’d said, and she’d almost laughed at the absurd understatement, except that she knew he wanted his den to get away from her. He’d suggested it quite casually one night and said it would be useful, somewhere for ‘either of us to get a little space’, and she’d struggled to hold back the astonishment and hurt; they hardly saw each other anyway: he was always at the office or golf or tucked away in his study. He’d then employed some very skilled and expensive builders, who had dug out the earth beneath their house and filled it with a games room, a wine cellar, a garage and a swimming pool. The neighbours had been upset by all the noise, the conveyor belt of rubble spewing out of the ground and the general disruptive blot on the landscape, and she’d been left to apologize, but at least it had been temporary, and nothing like the steel magnate’s four-storey subterranean bunker down the road, which had caused his neighbours’ front pillars to crack.
Taking the lift down to the pool, she waited for the hum of the motors to stop and then stepped into a twilight of lapis lazuli blue. Cutting a frothy swathe through the sub-lit water was Daniel and as usual the sight of him made her heart soar. She walked to the top of the deep end just as he was finishing his length and knelt down to the water’s edge.
He caught sight of her and stopped, water pouring off his strong shoulders as he hoisted himself effortlessly out of the water and threw his arms around her, grinning and holding her tight. She squealed in admonishment, as he knew she would do, and then unable to resist, she hugged him back.
Feeling the wet seep through, she pushed him away and brushed at the dark patches on her yellow shift dress.
‘That was not funny,’ she said, smiling.
‘Just giving my old mum a hug.’
‘Less of the old.’ In Laura’s head, she was still twenty-five and she often looked at other women in fascination at their encroaching middle-age before realizing she was the same generation. It amused her she was stuck in some sort of age amnesia; amused her still further when a look in the mirror confirmed that although she looked good for her age, she most definitely was not twenty-five.
‘Come on, all the boys fancy you and you know it.’
She smiled. It was true she enjoyed the flirtatious company of Daniel’s friends, the way they came round and leaned lazily on her breakfast bar, addressing her as ‘Mrs C’ and telling her how good her French toast was. It had been a while since she’d seen them.
‘How are Will and Jonny?’