‘Sandra?’ I ask, but as soon as I’ve said it I know who she means. The shape of the word lingers oddly in my mouth. I’m not sure I’ve ever said it before.
‘Yes,’ Amber says. ‘The woman at number 21, the woman whose house you’re staying in.’
‘OK,’ I say, and now my heart is thudding for a different reason. ‘So you …’ And I realize I don’t know what to say next.
Amber frowns minutely, knitting her fingers together and staring down at them. ‘I’ve always been aware of her,’ she says. ‘She moved in not long after us. You know, I see people around on this street all the time, but right from the start I saw her more than most people. She always seemed to be there, when I was out and about – just passing outside, or out in the front garden. We didn’t speak much, but she seemed friendly, and when you move somewhere new … I don’t have friends here, or family, and Carl was working away such a lot. I started to feel like I knew her.’ She shrugs, glancing at me for my reaction.
I look back at the regimented rows of houses stretching away from us. In this kind of place, familiarity feels like more than it is. The sight of the same people moving in and out of your eye-line from day to day seems to add up to more than the sum of its parts. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I see.’
‘It wasn’t easy between me and Carl, when we first moved here,’ she says. The flicker of unwillingness in her eyes tells me this must be important – that she wouldn’t say this to me unless she had to. ‘Our relationship had gone a long way in a short time. I hadn’t really got to grips with him yet. At times, I felt that I’d moved in with someone I barely knew, and he didn’t always help that. To be honest,’ she says, her voice rising now and her words coming faster, ‘I don’t think he was over you, or what happened. Not at all. He’d told me everything almost at once, when he barely even knew me. It was like he needed to pass it on to someone. I don’t think it really mattered who. I’m not saying he doesn’t love me,’ she adds warningly, flashing me a quick look. ‘But back then – I don’t know. It was a strange time.’
‘I can understand that,’ I say automatically, because she’s paused and she seems to be expecting something, but all I can think of is you – washed up in this place with a woman you fell for to save your sanity, spending your days and nights trying to deal with the fallout of everything that had happened. I don’t know why I never thought of you this way before. All along I’ve seen you as self-sufficient, impenetrable. I told myself that you would cope, that you had washed your hands of me and never wanted to see me again. In my darkest moments, I almost thought you had been glad of the chance to do it while playing the sacrificial lamb, in a way that so completely exonerated you of blame. I was the damaged one. There was no space to think of you as being the same.
‘Anyway,’ Amber continues, ‘one day, I invited her over for coffee. We hung out at my place for a while, just chatting. Nothing deep, you know … just small talk, but it broke up the day. It got to be a sort of routine, whenever Carl was away for a few days. She was a lot older than me, but I kind of liked that. It sounds stupid, but it was almost like she was looking after me. I was lonely, you see? I just wanted someone to talk to.’
She spreads out her hands unconsciously as she talks, opening up her isolation to me. ‘And one day – Carl and I had had a fight over the phone while he was away, and I’d said to him that I wasn’t sure why we were bothering, that I wasn’t sure if he would ever be able to let go of the past. He didn’t even answer me – he just hung up. I’d just got off the phone with him when Sandra turned up at the door. I’d forgotten I’d invited her, and I was in tears. She asked me what was wrong, and I—’
‘You told her,’ I finish, because suddenly I understand what this is about and the pieces are falling into place, and I can feel the hairs on my arms rising against my sleeves. ‘You told her everything.’
Amber nods. ‘You don’t understand what it was like,’ she says. ‘It used to go round and round in my head, everything he’d said. The way he told me about your affair, and about the accident, it was like reading his way through a script – all the words there right next to the surface. Like I said, he needed to pass it on. And I wanted to do the same.’
I try to put myself in this woman’s place. Imagine myself sitting in my home opposite Amber, listening to her tell me about how my daughter died. Understanding that the man I had thought was responsible was little more than a front for someone else. Someone who had walked away scot free. I can’t really do it – can’t get out of my own head for long enough to climb inside hers – but I think I glimpse the edge of it, a brief flash to the corner of my eye, and it’s enough to make me shudder.
‘What did she say?’ I force myself to ask. ‘How did she react?’
Amber shrugs minutely. ‘It was hard to tell,’ she says. ‘She’s very … controlled. She didn’t say much at all. But when I look back, that’s when she started behaving differently towards me.’
‘How do you mean?’ I ask. My voice is trembling slightly, and I breathe in deeply, trying to ground myself.
‘It’s hard to explain,’ Amber says. ‘The best way I can describe it is that she just became a lot more – intense. We usually met up once a week or so while Carl was away, but she started turning up more and more, almost every day at one point. I started realizing that we didn’t actually have much in common. When we were together so often, we had nothing to say to each other, but she kept on coming. And – I know this sounds a bit crazy, but I started noticing a few things going missing. My favourite umbrella, a jumper I liked, a bottle of Carl’s aftershave. I mean, I had no proof that she’d taken them, but—’
‘I understand,’ I say quickly. I think of the shock of my fingers closing around that bottle, the first hint of its scent. This has been delicately planned. A subtly plotted treasure map of hints and clues and red herrings, designed to lure me in.
‘I didn’t like it.’ Amber cuts into my thoughts. ‘The past couple of months, I’ve tried to distance myself. Been out at the times she normally called, cut our meetings short. It’s worked, in as far as we don’t see each other very much any more. But she’s … still there.’ I see a quick shiver rack her body, her eyes lost as she stares somewhere into the middle distance. ‘And then,’ she says, pulling herself back, ‘of course, then you turned up.’
‘Is that why you spoke to me in the first place?’ I ask. ‘Because you thought I knew her?’
‘Well …’ Amber looks briefly awkward. ‘I don’t mean that was the only reason – I mean, under different circumstances, maybe we could have been friends—’
I think the absurdity of trying to cling to social niceties in this situation strikes her as much as it does me, because her lips curve momentarily into a half-smile before her face straightens again. ‘But yes,’ she continues, ‘I suppose I thought I might be able to find out more about her somehow, through you. But then you told me that you didn’t really know her, and I thought it was better to say that I didn’t either, because of course I didn’t know if you were being honest with me or not, you didn’t even know me, and at one point I even started thinking that Sandra had sent you as a kind of plant, just to find out what I was saying about her when she wasn’t there …’ She stops, takes a breath as she listens to the echo of all these hastily spilt-out words.