Page 15 of Don't Let Him In

“And which train would that have been?”

And here it is. The train puts me in exactly the right time and place to conceivably have been following that stupid girl down the street. So I tell her the train I was on and tell her, yet again, that I have never been on that street before, that that man is not me, that that girl is mistaken, and that they are wasting their time.

The police officers leave a moment later and then it is just me, and my wife, in a quiet house full of awkward, unasked questions.

“That was weird,” says my wife, picking at the skin around her fingernails.

“Yes,” I agree. “Bizarre. But that was not me. You know that, don’t you?”

I see her eyes flick toward me and then away again.

“Oh,” I say, “come on… seriously? You seriously think that might have been me breathing down the girl’s neck like a total freak?”

“No. Of course not. But… God, he really, really looked like you, Jonathan. I mean he did, didn’t he?”

I want to break her jaw. I want to feel it shatter under my hardened knuckles. Instead, I smile gently, I put my hands on her hands. “Yes, he did. But it’s just a crazy coincidence. That is all.”

She nods, and I lift her face by her chin and kiss her exquisitely gently on her lips. I expect her to melt into the kiss, but instead I feel her freeze, her lips harden.

This is it. I can smell it, feel it, taste it. We’ve reached the end. She might not know it yet, but I do. I’ve been here before. The tipping point. Except usually it is not precipitated by a visit from the police accusing me of being a sex pest. (And to be accurate, I am not a sex pest. I was merely invading that woman’s personal space because I was annoyed by her energy. I wanted to ruffle her smug, implacable feathers, not rape her.)

We have dinner and the mood is strained and odd. And then I feel it coming from way down the line, like the chirrup of a distant train. She pushes her food around her plate and then she suddenly stops and looks at me and says, “Jonathan. Who are you? Who are you really?”

I blink at her. “I’m sorry, I don’t…?”

“Because there are things, Jonathan, things that don’t make sense, and I’ve been so patient, so very patient, waiting for everything to fall into place, for all of this”—she gesticulates wildly between the two of us—“to make some kind of sense, for all the money to make a difference to everything, for us to move on to the next stage, but it’s like we’re swimming in circles and it doesn’t matter how many loans we take out or how many hours I work or how hard you work, there’s never any money. And sometimes, Jonathan, sometimes I just really feel like I have no idea who you actually are.”

I let my head roll back slightly and I observe my wife, this new version of her, the one who has stopped living in the moment and has started putting the moments together.

“Who have you been talking to?” I ask softly.

“Nobody. I haven’t been talking to anybody, I’ve just been… thinking.”

“You know that’s mad, don’t you? I’m your husband. Of course you know who I am. I’ve lived here in this house with you for nearly four years. We know everything there is to know about each other.”

“No, Jonathan. You know everything there is to know about me. Ibarely know anything about you. I’ve never met a colleague, a friend, a relative—I mean, how do I even know you were where you said you were this weekend? I have nothing. No way of contacting you. No one to call if there’s an emergency—”

“Emergency?” I deflect. “What sort of emergency?”

“It doesn’t matter. I just feel, Jonathan, as if there’s a dark void here, in our world, and that you emerged from it and now I’m being sucked down into it too.”

Her eyes are wide as she ends this strangely poetic statement, as if she has scared herself by finally speaking her truth.

I sigh and close my eyes slowly, then open them again and look deeply into those dark, scared eyes. “Tara,” I say, “I love you. I adore you. Just keep the faith. Stay strong. Please, Tara, don’t give up on me. Not now.”

FOURTEEN

Ash goes to the cute little café across the street from the boutique and buys her usual lunchtime avocado, tomato, and vegan pesto panini. The couple who run the café are thirtyish and have a small, scruffy dog that sits in the window in a plaid jacket, watching the world go by. They are both smiley and comfortable in each other’s company. Ash watches the way they negotiate the narrow space behind the counter like a choreographed dance and she thinks, How did you meet each other? How did you know? How did you find the money to start a café? How did you know that was what you wanted to do? What is it like to beyou??

She taps her card to the contactless reader and smiles at the woman, who is probably only five years older than her but so clearly a woman and not a girl, and she takes her panini from the café, petting the dog as she passes. She sits on a bench on the promenade overlooking the sea, which is gray and frantic in the wind rolling in from the south.

It’s not, she thinks, as she unwraps the paper from around the sandwich, that she wants a husband, or even a boyfriend. She just wants to know that the boyfriend or the husband will arrive at some point. That the job will arrive. That the career and the dog and the flat and the whole deal will arrive. It doesn’t have to be now. But some sort of guarantee would quell the fear.

She sees two girls she went to school with walking past, one with a red cockapoo, the other with a golden cockapoo. The friends, who are wrapped up in similar full-length puffa coats and are wearing similar bobble hats, clutch coffee in paper cups and are lost in a deep conversation. As they pass, Ash sees that one of them—she thinks her name is Lauren, she’s not quite sure—is pregnant. They don’t notice her as they pass and she is glad; she realizes that she has let them all go, all the local friends, because she thought she was gone from this place, thought her time here in this small seaside village was done, that she didn’t need them anymore. But then she clearly didn’t have any idea who she was back then, what she was capable of, how badly she could possibly mess everything up.

She’d thought she was normal back then.

And now she knows she’s not.

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