Page 35 of Don't Let Him In

The blueberry loaf thing is delicious, the nicest thing I’ve eaten in days, and I chase the crumbs around the plate and tell the pretty girl who clears my table that it was wonderful and I look at her with hopeful eyes, because I am feeling hopeful, I am a man in love, after all, but she does not register it, nor my compliment about the food, she merely nods and says thanks in a flat monotone and I want to say something harsh, but I don’t. I just think that she is young and stupid and that it is not her fault. But I take a mental note of the name on her badge.Kadija. I have a good memory for names and faces.

It is 9:08. I have some time to kill, so I head up the road to a pawnshop I’d noticed as I was walking to the coffee shop. It was closed then but is open now and I step inside. It’s not my first time in a pawnshop. Behind the counter at the back is a tall, broad-chested Asian man with a closely clipped beard, smartly dressed in a waistcoat over a shirt fastened at the cuffs with gold links. I show him Tara’s ring and he looks at it closely and offers me £300. I’m tempted. I barely have enough money to pay for my train fare to Reading, but I know I should hold out. I can do better. I smile and thank him, put the ring back in my pocket, and leave.

The house is quiet. Tara’s car is not on the drive, though my stupid £25,000 Tesla is still there, gleaming smugly in the morning sun.Except it’s not technically mine anymore; it belongs to Tara now. I transferred the payment to a card I took out in her name a few days ago. She doesn’t know yet. I’d been planning to intercept the statements before she could get to them, but obviously that will be tricky if I’m not living here. Hopefully, by the time the first statement arrives, I will be long gone, sucked away into Martha’s world with a new name and a clean track record and there will be nothing Tara can do about the car or the credit card or, frankly, any of it. And I feel bad, of course I do, but that’s life. She made choices, she allowed it all to happen. I don’t want to say that she was stupid, but yes, fuck it. She was stupid. Stupid for love. Stupid for the status quo. Stupid for whatever it is that women get from having a man like me in their lives.

Over my lifetime I have developed the unique ability to see and understand within a second exactly what sort of man a woman is looking for and to offer it to her. After that it is up to the woman to set her boundaries, because if I am giving a woman what she wants, then she has to give me what I need. That doesn’t seem unfair, does it?

I turn off the Ring app remotely from my phone and let myself into the house. It’s tidy, it smells extra clean, almost as if Tara scrubbed my essence from it the moment I walked out of the door.

I go to the fridge and cut myself a hunk of cheese from a block of Cheddar and eat it as I pace about. It has already stopped feeling like home, this modern house that Tara loves so much. I can’t believe that this is where my life has played out for so long. Four years. And nothing to show for it. Not one thing.

It’s Emma’s fault. If she hadn’t got pregnant, I could have persuaded Tara to sell this horrible house and I would have had half a million pounds—maybe more—to play with now. But because Emma got pregnant, Tara refused to countenance it. So, instead, I am reduced to seeing what else I can salvage from the depressing wreck of our marriage.

I go to the corner of the conservatory that Tara uses as her homeoffice, and I open up the lid of her laptop. I’m not sure what I’m looking for. Tara will have something squirrelled away somewhere, and I know for a fact that she has a good life insurance policy because she took her husband’s name off it when we got married and added me. Unfortunately, there is only one way for me to access the money in that policy and, well, clearly that is not going to happen. What do you take me for?

I go into Tara’s bank account and type in her password. It says it has not been recognized, so I tap it in again, switching on the small eye icon to check I don’t mistype it, but it still doesn’t recognize the code. I feel a blast of fury pass through me at the realization that Tara has changed her password.

I spin round in her office chair to the filing cabinet behind me. It usually has a key hanging from the lock, but I notice that it’s gone. I flinch as I grasp the fact that in the two days since I left, my wife has changed the password to her bank account, cleaned the house to within an inch of its life, and taken away the keys to her filing cabinet.

Black rage starts to build at the base of my spine and I reflexively lock out my finger joints, lacing them together and pulling them apart. The feel of the bones cracking restores me to calm. Now is not the time to get angry. No time is the time to get angry; that is another thing I’ve learned. Anger is a derailer. It never solves anything, ever.

I sigh and run my hands through my hair and then I stiffen at the sound of a key in the door. I quietly close the lid of Tara’s laptop and step toward the hallway.

It’s Emma, Tara’s daughter. I see her put the key she used to let herself into the house into her pocket, and then slowly take off her coat. I back into the conservatory, my breathing silent. Then I notice my raincoat hanging on one of the hooks by the back door in the kitchen and I walk quickly toward it. By the time Emma comes upon me in the kitchen, I have it in my hand and my face is arranged into a pleasant smile, my other hand clutching my chest in a slightly feyOoh, you gave me a startgesture.

“Emma!” I say. “What are you doing here?”

She eyes me inscrutably. “I thought you were going away for a week.”

“Yes. I am. I’m staying with a friend, in London. I just came back to get my raincoat. Weather forecast looks horrible.”

“You came all the way to Reading to get a raincoat?” Her hand goes absent-mindedly to her pregnant belly as she speaks, a gesture that inexplicably annoys me. Something about the superiority of it.

“Yes. And a few other things. I packed in a hurry, I wasn’t really thinking.” I pause for a moment and then I say again, “What are you doing here?”

“Mum said she saw something on the Ring app. Asked me to come and check.”

I know this is a lie. I deactivated the app before I arrived. It occurs to me that Emma has been charged with “keeping an eye on the place.”

“Oh, right, well, that would be me, then.” I shrug and grin, all Hugh Grant, affable and unthreatening, but I don’t see even a chink in her demeanor.

“Have you got everything?” she says, glancing at my raincoat.

“Yes,” I say. “I have. Are you going to escort me off the premises?” I ask this with humor, but also in the knowledge that that is exactly what she wants to do.

“No,” she says, “but it’s probably best if you leave.”

“You do realize I still live here, Emma. I’ve only moved out temporarily.”

“Yes. I do. And you do realize that this house is in my mother’s name and that legally you have no right to be here.”

There. There it is. This is the open face of the secret conversations that have been playing out here during the days when I’ve been at work. It’s oozing through the cracks now for me to see.

I keep my face neutral. “Oh yes, Emma, I am well aware of that.Your mother has been very careful to ensure that I never forget that fact.” I sound bitter, and I am bitter. Whilst Tara has always shown me full trust (hence me having access to her bank account), she has always kept something back from me, and it’s only now that I feel the full force of that reserve.

“I think you should go.”

She has a hard face, Emma, she’s not feminine like her mother. She looks like her dad. I want to punch that face, just once, dead center.Bang. I’ve wanted to punch her face since pretty much the first time I met her four years ago. It’s her fault that Tara has held back from me; she put doubt into her head from the very beginning. Questioned my motivations. Googled me. Told her mother she thought I was “dodgy.”

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