Page 23 of Don't Let Him In

“Sorry,” says Nick. “Nina sent me for crisps. I didn’t mean to make you jump.”

“That’s OK,” she says. “I’m a jumpy person.”

She ponders his back as he leans down to the cupboard where he already knows they keep the crisps. She says, “You know when you worked with my dad? Back in the nineties? Did you ever meet his girlfriend?”

She sees him pause before collecting two bags of crisps by their corners and pulling them out. He straightens and turns. His face is a picture of hard remembering. “No,” he says. “No. I don’t think I did. I mean, he must have had a few back then, a guy like your dad. So gregarious, such a live wire.”

“No,” Ash responds simply. “No, he only ever had two girlfriends. My mum was the second. He was still going out with the first when he met my mum. There was a messy overlap.”

Nick nods. “Right,” he says. “Well, he never mentioned her to me in that case.”

She nods, doesn’t say what she wants to say, which is that Jane was all over every element of her dad’s life back then, sat in restaurants where he worked, waiting for him to finish, came to meet him at one in the morning after his shifts, called him constantly on the restaurant phone, five or six times a night.

“How long did you say that you and my dad worked together?”

“Oh, only a few months, you know. Maybe not even that. I couldn’t hack it in the end. Your dad had the gumption for it. I just didn’t.”

He waves the crisps at her and taps the kitchen counter twice with his index finger before smiling, somewhat uncertainly, and leaving again.

TWENTY-TWO

It sits in Martha’s gullet, the absence of her husband; it makes a dense puddle of adrenaline that eats away at her gut. He’d left yesterday morning, an emergency call, a mission. She’d let him go, shown kindness and patience about the fact that she’d have to take Nala to the shop with her. It’s his job, she’d said to herself. You knew what you were taking on when you got together with him. But then the promised message to tell her what time he’d be back didn’t come; none of her messages were opened, let alone replied to; her calls went through to voicemail; and soon it was ten o’clock, eleven o’clock, the day was over, he was not coming home, and she found herself at her laptop, googling “hotels with hair salons Glasgow.” The search whittled the dozens of Glasgow hotels down to seven, only two of which were boutique hotels. When she perused their websites, she saw that though they had hair salons, neither of them had a gym. She slammed down the lid of her laptop as if it might burn her.

He gets home on Sunday night looking bedraggled and broken. Martha stares at him as he falls through the front door in his black jacket and scarf, his chin opaque with extra beard growth, his reading glasses perched on top of his head.

“What the fuck, Al.”

“Yeah, I know. And I’m sorry.”

She closes her eyes and sighs. “Sorry is what you say if you’re a few minutes late for something, Al. Sorry is what you say if you forgot to pick up some milk. It’s not what you say to someone when you’ve ghosted them for a full twenty-four hours.” Her stomach roils with adrenaline, her heart races under her rib cage. “Are you having an affair, Al?” she says, her voice harsh and sore. “Just tell me. Please.”

Al looks at her with shock and horror. “What?” he says. “Are you… God,no?! No, of course not. What on earth made you think that?”

“Your phone being switched off. And, Al, the secret phone you keep in our wardrobe, in your father’s medical bag. I saw you shoving it back in there on Friday morning, just as I walked into the room.”

“A secret phone?”

“Yes. I saw you putting something into that bag, and then I found it, in the inside compartment. A phone. Why is there a phone in there?”

His brow furrows and he pinches his stubbled chin between his thumb and forefinger. “Are you talking about my father’s phone?”

“The phone in that bag.”

“That’s my father’s. I don’t know why I kept it, but I did. Look, do you want me to get it for you—show you?”

His bright blue eyes are wide and eager. But she’s seen the brightness of his eyes enough times before to know that it’s a trap, designed to be fallen into. “No,” she says. “No. I don’t care about the phone. It’s more than that. It’s—where’ve you been? Why didn’t you call? Why didn’t you reply to my messages?”

He sighs wholeheartedly. “It’s been a nightmare, Martha. I mean, I can’t even begin to tell you. That hotel is broken. The management is toxic. Five members of staff had walked out before I even got there—I had to wait tables, I had to man the front desk. I was on the phone to recruitment agencies, interviewing temps. I didn’t eat, Martha. I literally just had fruit out of bowls, stale croissants, cold coffee…”

He’s talking and he’s talking, and there are words and words and words, and they keep coming out of his mouth, but not one of themexplains the lack of a simpleI’m not coming home tonight, I’m so sorrytext. It takes longer to eat a stale croissant than to send a message like that.

“You could have texted,” she says. “You could have called. You’ve sat in a car for three hours, Al, with a phone. You could have called to say you were on your way back.”

“I know. You’re right. But I just ended up on back-to-back calls with the team the whole journey. And by the time I got off all the calls, I was fifteen minutes away and I just thought there was no point.”

Martha doesn’t want any of this drama. She wants a quiet Sunday night in with her dreamy husband. She wants to open a bottle of wine and find something to watch together, to tell him about her weekend, hear about his. When things are good between them, she genuinely believes that there is nothing in the world that is better, and now she is sitting here making a conscious decision to rob herself of a pleasant Sunday night with the man she loves. But it’s too urgent inside her, the need to ask questions, to get answers. It hurts.

“What was the name of the hotel,” she says, “the one where you stayed when you left your wedding ring in the gym?”

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