Page 100 of The New House

It’s odd hearing him use his mother’s first name.

‘I’m not worried,’ she says.

‘You should be,’ Peter says. ‘You should be worried aboutHarper. She talks too much. I hear her at night recording her vlogs. She talks aboutyou.’

Stacey pictures him creepingthrough the house in the dark, listening at doors, hiding in shadows. She hopes for her sake Harper locks her bedroom door.

Peter gulps his Coke, and then lets out a small burp and grins. Sometimes it’s easy to forget he’s still a child. ‘What are we going to do?’ he asks.

‘Wearen’t going to do anything.’

‘You’ve let it drag on too long,’ Peter says. ‘You know what you have to do. You just need todoit.’

Sometimes it’s easy to forget he’s not like other children. ‘It’s not that simple,’ she says.

‘Yes, it is. Stop pretending you haven’t decided. You know you’re going to do it anyway, so just get on with it.’

‘Your mother will be here soon,’ Stacey says.

‘Icould do something,’ he says, as if she hasn’t spoken. ‘Before Harper goes home. We have to stop her or she’ll ruin everything. You said I was a big help last time,’ he adds. ‘You said you couldn’t have done it without me.’

Stacey glances down the street. She doesn’t know what’s keeping Millie: she should be here by now. ‘I shouldn’t have involved you,’ she tells Peter.

She’s not thinking of him when she says that. She’s aware she took an insane risk, an unforgivable risk, by involving a ten-year-old. She still isn’t quite sure why she did it. Perhaps she was just tired of being alone.

Stacey has never had friends. But she learned the hard way survival depended on fitting in. She didn’t ever want to go back to the place they sent her after she smashed the face of the boy who tried to kiss her with a rounders bat. So she figured out how to censor what she really thinks. She learned to mimic the appropriate reactions and behave the way the world expected her to behave, to hide in plain sight, to blend in: she’s done it so well she’s built a career based on her ability to empathise andfeel your pain. But the constant effort required to pretend to be normal isexhausting.

And it’slonely.

It’s like being immersed in a foreign language: sometimes she just wants to speak plainly and be understood.

Peter understands.

Stacey saw what Peter did that day at the Hurlingham Club. She saw him pull Archie beneath the water while everyone was distracted by the antics of the two Conway boys, and for a moment, as she watched anddid nothing, she allowed herself to imagine Archie gone and Peter her son instead.

Peter saw her watching him, and something passed between them: an understanding, a recognition that transcendedten-year-old boy, thirty-eight-year-old woman. Shesawhim. He was a child like she had been: a child who lied all the time, who broke things, who bruised his classmates, who hurt people. He couldn’t help it. He was biologically wired not to feel shame or fear or guilt. He’d been born without the ability to empathise, toput yourself in my shoes, just as some people are born without limbs. It wasn’t his fault – any more than it had been hers.

She wanted to teach Peter everything she knew, to mentor him, to protect him, to see him flourish and become who he was born to be. For the first time in her life she understood what it was to feel like a mother.

So she told him about Felix.

Her phone rings suddenly, and she glances at the number: DS Mehdi again. She wants to ignore it, but he’s already called twice this afternoon, and the last thing she needs is for him to turn up at the house.

‘Stay here,’ she tells Peter, as she shuts herself in her bedroom. ‘Wait for your mother. She won’t be long.’

DS Mehdi is just checking in, he tells her, but Stacey knows the avalanche of publicity aroundthe video is making the detective look at her seriously again. He’s always been the one she feared. She’s on the phone longer than she’d like, and when she finally ends the call and goes back into the kitchen, Peter isn’t there.

She knows where he is.

She goes downstairs. The door to the cellar is open. She can hear a strange gurgling, ascratching, like a rat caught in a drain. She’s not someone who experiences fear, but something speeds her down the cellar stairs so fast she can’t feel her own feet.

Peter is waiting for her at the bottom. He smiles up at her, those beautiful tawny eyes clear and untroubled.

‘I was just tidying up for you,’ he says.

chapter 60

millie

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