Page 19 of Don't Let Him In

“No,” Nina had said. “He’s at work. He won’t be able to talk.”

“He might.”

“No, I’ll just message him.”

Ash had wanted to put him on the spot, to hear his explanation for the ring and for it to be fresh.

“I’ll call him. Give me your phone.”

Nina had looked at her with narrowed, questioning eyes. “Er, Ash. It’s fine. I said, I’ll message him.”

Ash had backed down. There was no way to explain to her mother what was going through her mind without sounding like a needy, insecure child who couldn’t deal with the fact that her recently widowed mother was seeing a new man.

Now she tucks her phone away in her pocket, gets to her feet, and says to Marcelline, “I’m going to go into the back, do some steaming.”

The afternoon is slow and only three customers come in. One buys a Dorothy Perkins summer dress, another buys three pieces of identical knitwear, and the other is a regular who arrives with two glossy carrier bags full of castoffs and stays for tea, which kills an hour of the day until finally it is five thirty and Ash can pull on her jacket, sling on her bag, head back up the hill to the big white house, and chalk up another pointless day waiting for everything to make sense.

EIGHTEEN

Martha walks into the bedroom at six thirty, holding their morning coffees. Al is in his boxer shorts and a T-shirt, just tucking something into the wardrobe. He looks flushed, as though she has just caught him out somehow. Martha sees the shape of the bag he keeps in his side of the wardrobe. It’s a strange, battered leather thing with a big metal clasp and a brass padlock and belonged to his father, apparently, the narcissistic sociopath who, ironically, had been a GP in a small rural Yorkshire community, well loved by his patients. It’s all he has left of his father, Al told Martha a long time ago. He keeps it to balance out the hatred he feels, to remind him that his father had also been a good person, and that maybe if a hundred people remember you as a good person, then it doesn’t matter about the one person whose life you destroyed with cruelty and disinterest.

“What are you up to?” she asks him.

“Oh, nothing. I was just looking for something.”

His energy is strange, there’s color in his cheeks. She wants to push, but she doesn’t want to spoil the nice mood that’s been between them since that morning early in the week when it had snowed for a few minutes and they’d felt for a brief moment like a special family, the sort of family you dream about belonging to.

“I’m taking Nala to the childminder’s at eight today,” she says. “Are you still going to be able to open up the shop for me?”

He looks up at her and smiles and nods. The awkward color has gone from his cheeks. “Absolutely,” he says. “I will be there.”

Martha smiles back at him gratefully. He’s been helping out at the shop more and more recently. He’s taken over deliveries too, a few days a week. He says things are quiet at work at the moment. He says he enjoys helping her out and it’s the least he can do since he lives in her house rent-free. Martha has never had a proper grown-up colleague before, someone to whom she can hand over everything and trust implicitly. She’s always worked alongside young adults; she likes giving them the opportunity to learn a trade. But they don’t last long, these Gen Z–ers—the early starts, the hours on their feet, the weekends, the low pay, the cold. They usually stay long enough to get something decent on their CVs and then they’re gone. She has sweet Milly at the moment, but Martha can already tell she’s running out of enthusiasm. Floristry is vocational, nobody does it unless they love it, and she can see that Milly doesn’t love it, that she lives for her days off and holidays. Having Alistair involved is like a breath of fresh air. Having adult company, a driver she can trust to get to the right place at the right time and deliver with charm and professionalism, has been a game changer for Martha. She used to hate leaving Nala at the childminder at seven in the morning, particularly at this time of year when it’s still dark outside. It felt cruel and inhuman, but now that Alistair opens the shop for her most mornings, she can take Nala at eight instead, or even nine, like the other mothers do.

Nala and the boys are still asleep, and the world is soft and quiet. Al gets to his feet and stretches, then kisses her as he passes on his way to the shower. He has that sugary, slightly doughy smell of sleepy men and his nighttime breath has become trapped in his stubble, but she likes the way he smells even now. She climbs on the bed and drinks her coffee, looks at the time: 6:36 a.m. Al hums in the shower and her heart is filled with gratitude for her man.

But then something inside her warps slightly, a burn of wrongness, the image of Al pushing that weird bag into the wardrobe. She movesquietly off the bed and kneels in front of the wardrobe, slowly opens the door, and pulls the bag toward her. The padlock is undone; he must have pushed it back hurriedly. She snaps the metal clasp and the bag creaks open on rusty hinges. The main body of the bag is empty, but there are numerous compartments, all of which appear to be locked too. In one of the compartments is a small bulge. She fingers it and makes out the edges of what feels like a phone. The minute she feels it, her stomach hits the base of her spine. A secret phone. There is no lock on this compartment and her hands shake as she starts to open it, peering upward as she does so to gauge the sound levels of Alistair’s shower. But just as she is about to pull the zip open, she hears the water stop, the squeak of the Victorian-style knob being turned. She closes the bag and pushes it back in the wardrobe, angling it just so, her heart racing hard under her pajama top, her coffee cup shaking slightly in her hand.

NINETEENFOUR YEARS EARLIER

Do I have a job? Yes.

Am I a hospitality training director?

No, I am not.

It matters not what I do for a living, but let’s just say that it’s sporadic, ad hoc, I can do it whenever I want, cash in hand, under the radar, and it’s very useful in terms of filling gaps in my finances. And right now, I have a massive hole in my finances, a hole so big that no amount of ad hoc, cash-in-hand work is going to fill it. I’ve just bought a car.

I’m in it right now, breathing in the aroma of a fresh valet service, my hands gripping the steering wheel as I drive home to my wife. It was an impulse purchase. I took Martha and her boys to the big used-car dealership near their house and we spent three hours wandering around. I bought them all lunch at the American-style diner there, then we returned to claim the Tesla that the boys had been so keen on. I paid for it on a card, £25,000, making sure that they were nowhere in earshot as the man at the sales desk conducted his conversation with me as “Mr. Truscott.”

Buying a car was easy enough to do. Paying for it is a problem I will have to deal with later. You might think it’s stressful living as I do, from one credit card to the next, one lie to the next, but it really isn’t. I’m not like other people, you see.

The boys asked if they could drive back with me from the dealership. I could tell that at the very least I had cracked the older one, who I now know is called Troy. The younger one, Jonah, is still cagey, less impressed by flashy cars. I can see him now in the rearview mirror, strapped in on the back seat, the seat belt cutting in at his neck because even though he’s ten, he’s still so small. His hands are spread out on the upholstery at either side, and he stares resolutely ahead.

“What do you think?” I say, playing up the soft northern tones of my accent. “Do you like her?”

“Her?” says Jonah.

“Yes,” I say to his reflection in the mirror. “Cars, boats, airplanes, they’re all girls. Not sure why. And maybe that’s a bit old-fashioned now. Maybe nowadays it’s a ‘them’?”

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