The Fallout (15 page)

“You're joking, right? Dan
left
Sasha and September. He
chose
to go. No one forced him. He should have thought about money before he walked out on his family. And to sneak into the house while Sasha was out, stealing stuff...it's creepy.”

“Come on. It's hardly stealing if it was his in the first place.”

“Josh! It was a fucking invasion of her privacy. Surely you're not trying to defend him? Sasha is in pieces. She says she doesn't feel safe in the house anymore, thinking he could just let himself in at any time. She's had all the locks changed—and that wasn't cheap, let me tell you—but she still says she feels violated.”

“Is she going to report it to the police?”

“Absolutely. Apparently her lawyer said it would be great for her case because...”

Hannah stopped short.

“I shouldn't tell you. It'll get straight back to Dan.”

“Don't be ridiculous.”

“No. Forget it. I'm not saying anything more.”

A sense of injustice flared within him. Just where did Hannah's loyalties lie these days? It was supposed to be the two of them who were the team, who didn't have secrets from each other, yet increasingly he found himself locked out from what was going on in her head. Last weekend, when she'd come home from that club with Sasha, he'd gotten the definite sense that something had happened, something bad, but she hadn't wanted to talk about it and had fobbed off his inquiries with vague answers. He soon stopped quizzing her when she made it obvious that she was in the mood for sex for the first time in months. He'd been so surprised, so pathetically grateful, he hadn't attempted to find out what lay behind this sudden and, as it turned out, short-lived change of heart, and after that the moment had passed. And now she wouldn't even talk to him about this legal stuff.

“If you're going to hold out on me, I'm going to call Dan right now to find out what's going on.”

Hannah glared at him, calling his bluff.

“Fine. But just don't mention lawyers.”

He had expected her to back down and open up about what Sasha had told her, but now he was left in the position of having to follow through and put in a call to Dan, right then and there, something he had no inclination to do.

“Josh, mate! How are you doing?”

Shit. He hadn't imagined Dan would pick up, not on a Friday evening. Shouldn't he be lying in bed drinking champagne with his hot new girlfriend? Wasn't that sort of the point of having left his wife and child?

“Fine. Listen, I'm at my parents and Hannah just got a call from Sasha to say someone's been in the house and taken stuff. I know it's your house and everything, but it's not a good idea to...”

“What? They've been robbed? Why didn't she tell me? Are they both okay?”

Josh was taken aback. Dan sounded genuinely concerned. Either he was doing some very convincing acting, or he truly didn't know anything about it.

“Yeah, they're fine. I don't think much went missing—a bit of art, some jewelry. It's just that, well, she thinks it was you.”

Dan went silent.

“She thinks you let yourself into the house when she was out.”

Dan's exclamation was so loud, Hannah looked up, eyebrows raised, from the kitchen table, where she'd been digging grooves with a fingernail in one of the place mats.

“Brilliant! That is fucking brilliant! She's trying to make me out to be a fucking thief as well as a wifebeater. The woman is insane. Do you know what? I wouldn't be surprised if there was no break-in at all, and she's just making the whole fucking thing up. Did that ever occur to you?”

It hadn't in fact occurred to him, but now the possibility had been put into his head, Josh couldn't help feeling it made sense. Sasha was totally unhinged at the moment. Just thinking back to last weekend, when she'd been all over him like a horrible rash before they'd left for the club, made him feel mortified all over again. He hadn't responded to her. He was practically sure he hadn't. But there'd been a moment when she was rubbing her hands all over him, when he'd found himself thinking about Hannah and how rarely she touched him these days, and how much he longed for her to be doing what Sasha was doing, and he couldn't help it, he'd become... No, no, no. He couldn't—wouldn't—think about that. The point was that Sasha wasn't stable. But was she really bonkers enough to invent a break-in, just to get back at Dan?

“This is getting serious, you know,” Dan continued. “This is getting fucking serious. I'm really beginning to worry about her state of mind, and whether September is even safe with her. Do you know we've been getting a stream of pizza deliveries and cabs turning up at the door that we never ordered? Yesterday, get this, a guy turned up to quote for a conservatory we'd apparently expressed an interest in. We don't even have a fucking garden.”

“Yeah, but just because she orders a couple of prank pizzas it doesn't make her a bad mum. She dotes on September, you know that.”

But even as he was saying it, Josh was thinking about what Hannah had said about the guest room being empty, and no sign of a babysitter.

“Look, Dan, I've been talking to Hannah.” Josh wasn't looking at his wife, but he felt her stir to attention at the mention of her name.

“Anyway,” he went on, “we both feel like maybe it would be a good idea for us to meet Sienna. I mean, she's clearly a part of your life that isn't going away.”

“Oh, mate, that's...”

“But that doesn't mean we're in favor of what you did or anything, and just because we're ready to meet her, doesn't mean you should introduce her to September or anything.”

“No. Absolutely. I wouldn't. Not yet anyway.”

From the corner of his eye, Josh could see Hannah gesturing angrily, but he ignored it.

“I'll tell Sienna. She can't wait to meet you guys. Maybe you could come over for dinner. She makes a wicked Thai curry.”

After he ended the call, Josh remained staring out into the black back garden, where in a previous life he'd stood for hours alone with a swingball set, hitting the ball back and forth through the dragging afternoons, imagining he was two separate people.

“I can't believe you just did that.”

Hannah looked up accusingly, her pink cheeks clashing with her red hair.

“Hang on a minute. You said...”

“Yes,
eventually.
I meant we'd meet her
eventually.
Not right now. What am I going to tell Sasha?”

“Don't tell her anything. She doesn't need to know.” Josh put out a conciliatory hand to touch Hannah's arm. “Look, Hans, I know Sasha is our friend, but this is
our
life. Yours and mine. We don't have to place her at the center of everything we say and do. We're entitled to be friends with who we want.”

A shriek went up from the living room.

“Josh!” His mother's agitated voice came from the living room. “Your dog's just peed on the flokati!”

Hannah pulled away. “Our life,” she repeated, as if he'd said something amusing. And again, softly, in a tone he didn't altogether like.

“Our life.”

Lucie/Eloise, age nine

Sometimes I miss Mummy so much it gives me a tummy ache. I don't miss her being cross or making gobbling noises and looking at me with her cold-fish eyes, but I miss the way her voice sounds when she tries to learn all the funny English sayings from her book. When I told her on the phone that I miss her, she said “fiddlesticks.” (Except it sounds like this when she says it: feed-el-sticks.) She was in a good mood when I spoke to her on the phone, and I almost told her about being Eloise but didn't dare. When we said goodbye and I was crying she told me “Don't be silly!” and said “Onnyva,” which I asked Madame LeFeuvre about and she said means “Let's go!” Up and at 'em!

Chapter 16

Hannah was finally getting down to work. That dreadful weekend at Josh's parents' house, where she'd gotten nothing done at all, had really made her fall behind and it was such a relief to have a proper child-free stretch in which to focus her mind on the article, already two days overdue. Lily had jumped at the chance of going to Sarah's house for lunch, and Marcia had seemed genuinely pleased when Hannah accepted her offer of picking up the two girls from preschool and taking them home for a couple of hours. It would make a refreshing change for both her and Lily to spend a bit of time with people who weren't in the middle of a domestic crisis.

She'd been nervous about broaching it with Sasha and had tried to be as casual as she could when explaining why they wouldn't be able to join them in the park straight from school, but Sasha hadn't seemed bothered. In fact she hadn't reacted at all, which was a relief. Sasha's moods were so hard to judge these days. Hannah hadn't spent much time with Sasha, fearing she'd give herself away. The invitation to dinner at Sienna's house this evening was looming so large in her conscience, she was surprised it wasn't tattooed across her forehead.

It was incredible how much more she could get done when she knew she had a clear run of time. Hannah had done three phone interviews, and sorted out what she wanted the feature to say. She'd even nailed the introduction, which was always the hardest part. Petra, the features editor on the magazine Hannah wrote for most regularly, was an ambitious, go-getting twenty-nine-year-old who wore Louboutins in the office and worked through lunch eating quinoa salads from little plastic containers. She didn't understand about child care or how you felt after a few sleepless nights, or why it was impossible to get anything done if your toddler was home sick. Hannah'd had to blame the lateness of the feature on the fact that one of the interviewees was being difficult rather than admitting she just didn't have enough hours in the day. With any luck, now she'd made some progress, she could finish off the feature before they had to leave for this dinner with Sienna and Dan, and it would be in Petra's inbox first thing in the morning.

The other thing about burying herself in work was that Hannah hadn't had time to think about what was hidden in the cupboard in her room. And as long as she didn't think about it, she could pretend it wasn't there, and keep that gnawing, low-level worry at bay.

Damn. Twenty past three. She ought to be getting off to Marcia's now to pick up Lily. Lily was still so young, if Hannah left her too long in a new place she'd be totally exhausted, particularly on a Monday when she was still tired from the weekend.

Marcia lived a few streets away, on a street where one side of the Victorian terraces had been bombed during the war and replaced by social housing. Most of the houses were now privately owned, but a few still had the neglected appearance of long-term tenanted properties. On the way there, progress hindered by having to stop at every tree and postbox for Toby to have a good sniff, Hannah rehearsed in her mind the shape the rest of the article would take, remembering an argument she hadn't included in her plan, and making a note to herself to scribble it down as soon as she arrived back home.

A wave of panic hit her as she thought about everything she still had to do that day. In a few hours' time, they were supposed to be making the trek across town to Notting Hill, and in between now and then, she had to finish off her feature, get Lily fed and bathed and ready for bed and settled in the babysitter—a teenager from three doors down whom Lily quietly idolized. And that was to say nothing of getting herself ready. Ever since Josh made the dinner arrangement, Hannah had been agonizing about what to wear. She'd been feeling so washed out and tired lately, and nothing seemed to fit her properly. The thought of meeting up with a fresh-faced twenty-four-year-old model was mildly depressing.

Hannah had never really been someone who compared herself to other women, getting a boost when the balance swung in her favor and despairing when it didn't. She was what she was, she had always believed. And no amount of fretting was going to change that, so she might just as well accept it and move on. Besides, you only really noticed the way people looked in the early stages of meeting them—as soon as you got to know them, looks ceased to matter. Her boyfriend before Josh had been, in her mother's words, “very quirky-looking,” but from the moment he first made her laugh, she'd ceased to see his large, hooked nose, or the crisscrossing front teeth.

Yet something about meeting Sienna was getting to her. Maybe it was just that she was feeling generally so insecure. She knew things with Josh weren't right. She couldn't remember the last time they'd gone so long without having sex, apart from that drunken, frenzied coupling the night she'd come home from that nightclub with the image of Sasha and Ed in that grubby toilet cubicle playing across her mind. But she didn't have the energy to address it. Easier to ignore the problem than to have to start thinking about what lay at the heart of it. Funny how the lack of a physical relationship made one feel so void of substance, so unvital. A sexless husk of a person, dried up and sapless. And she was dreading being around a couple who were still so overtly in the honeymoon stages. She couldn't bear the idea of she and Josh sitting side by side like maiden aunts, while Dan and this woman, this girl, really (in her imagination, she was getting younger and younger by the minute) were all over each other.

Though modest, Marcia's house appeared lovingly cared for. A wooden gate opened onto a tiny front garden, which was a cheerful mass of greenery and gravel with painted window boxes on every sill. Inside the little glassed-in porch, Hannah could make out Sarah's and her two older sisters' flowery rain boots lined up in a haphazard row beneath three pegs accommodating an assortment of brightly colored coats and striped woolen scarves. The effect was one of happy chaos, and Hannah found herself looking forward to going inside and having a cup of tea and a chat with the ever-calm Marcia about subjects that for once didn't involve cheating husbands and money-grabbing girlfriends.

But when Marcia came to the door she looked uncharacteristically stern-faced. Behind her, Hannah could hear the sound of a small girl in the throes of a crying fit.

“Sounds like you've got your hands full. Is everything okay? That's not Lily, is it?”

She was smiling, but uncomfortably aware Marcia wasn't following suit. In fact the other woman was frowning at her, seemingly confused. For a moment Hannah thought Toby was the problem. Maybe she shouldn't have brought him. But then Marcia said, “Lily's not here. Surely you knew?”

Hannah felt something turn to ice inside her.

“What do you mean, not here? Where is she?”

“When I got to school to pick them up, Mrs. Mackenzie said Lily had already left with Sasha. Apparently she turned up early. Said she was collecting both Lily and September.”

“But I told her...”

“Sarah was pretty upset—as you can probably hear.” Marcia opened the door wider so Hannah could better hear the steady wailing noise coming from inside the house.

“Oh, Marcia. I'm so sorry. I don't know what to say.”

Hannah felt hot with embarrassment even though she had no idea how the mix-up could have happened. Hurrying away down the street, her cheeks burning, she tried Sasha's numbers—mobile and landline—without success. Both went straight to voice mail. Where was she? Hannah knew she'd told Sasha about the arrangement with Marcia, and even if Sasha hadn't been paying attention, she knew better than to take Lily without consulting with Hannah. They'd always been so respectful of each other like that, never presuming something was okay without checking it out first.

Not knowing what else to do, she went to Sasha's house, leaning heavily on the buzzer. No answer. By now Hannah was out of breath and sweaty, her stomach churning uncomfortably. Worry nipped at her insides.

She dialed Josh, letting out a groan of frustration when his phone also went straight to voice mail.

“I can't find Lily,” she snapped, deliberately omitting to mention their daughter was with Sasha. “Call me back.”

Hurrying back home, she tried to ignore the painful stitch in her side, convincing herself that when she turned the corner, she'd see Sasha and the girls waiting outside the front door. There'd be some easy explanation. Yet she could see right away that there was no one there and no sign of Sasha's car outside.

She started to feel afraid. Sasha had been so erratic recently. If Hannah was very honest with herself she knew Sasha wasn't really fit to be looking after her own daughter. What had she done with Lily? All sorts of unwelcome scenarios passed through her head. Sasha lining up for the ferry with the girls strapped into the backseat of the car, or going out somewhere and forgetting she had them with her, leaving them on the tube, or in a supermarket car park.

At home, she paced the floor, phone in hand. No sooner had she ended one futile call to Sasha than she was redialing her number.
Please pick up
, she muttered.
Come on, for fuck's sake, pick up.
“Sasha, it's me again. Call me,” she repeated for the millionth time.

When her phone finally did ring, she was unreasonably furious to see Josh's name flashing up on her screen.

“I thought you'd be Sasha.”

“I've been in a staff meeting. What's happening with Lily?” His voice was tight. “Have you found her?”

“No. But I think Sasha took her.”

“Sasha?” He sounded relieved. “So you know she's safe at least?”

“No, I bloody well don't. It wasn't Sasha's turn to have her. She didn't even... Oh, never mind. I've got to go. She might be trying to call.”

Cutting the conversation short, she checked her phone for missed calls, even though she knew it always made a beeping sound if someone tried to get through while she was talking. She checked the time. Half past four.
Where was she?

She'd been planning on having a shower before they went, and washing her hair, maybe even applying a treatment from the hugely expensive jar she'd been persuaded into buying the last time she visited the hairdresser. But now all thoughts of clothes and makeup had been swept aside by worry for Lily. Even the anxiety about the thing hidden away in the wardrobe, which had been like a constant buzzing in her ears over the last few days since she'd brought it into the house, was pushed out of her head by this new crisis.

It was nearly five when the doorbell sounded. Hannah had been standing at the table working through the class list making frantic calls to see if anyone had seen Sasha and the girls.

“Hi.” Sasha stood with an arm around both Lily and September, a broad smile cracking her face. “Aren't I the best friend you ever had? Kept her out of your hair for five and a half hours! Hope you got masses of work done, or I might just have to kill you.”

Hannah grabbed Lily's shoulders and pulled her toward her, almost crushing her in her need to feel her warm, solid little body again. She glared at Sasha over the top of Lily's head.

“Where the hell have you been?” Sasha's smile evaporated. “You knew Lily was supposed to be going to Marcia's for lunch. Since when do you take her out of school without telling me?”

“Now, hang on a minute. I had no idea Lily was supposed to be going to Marcia's. And I did tell you. I sent you a text before I picked her up.”

“No, you didn't. That's a bare-faced lie.”

Sasha's face was pinched and dark.

“Don't you dare call me a liar. Check your phone. Go on. Check it.”

“I don't need to check it. I've been checking it all afternoon while I've been trying to get hold of you.”

Even so, Hannah couldn't help glancing at her phone. Sure enough, there was an alert, showing that a text message had come through.

“I don't believe this.”

Clicking on it, she saw it was indeed from Sasha.
Am picking up Lil so you can get some work done x.

“But you've only just sent this. You must have. What use is that when I've been frantic with worry all afternoon?”

“Hannah. I don't believe this. First of all, I sent that text hours ago. I don't know why it took so long to get through. Maybe because we were in the park. You know how dodgy the signal is there. Secondly, I don't know why you were so frantic—Mrs. Mackenzie would have told you Lily was with me. All I wanted was to do you a bloody favor.”

Sasha's face, tilted sharply toward Hannah, was a scrunched-up scowl of indignation. September, meanwhile, looked as if she was about to cry, moving her eyes from one woman to the other and back again, and Hannah felt the anger drain from her like dirty bathwater.

“Sorry,” she grunted. “I just panicked, that's all.”

“Get a grip. This is me, okay? I love Lily like she's my own daughter, you know that. Anyway, now I'm here, any chance of some tea?”

“Yes,
please
,” begged September.

Hannah froze. She was already so behind schedule. No way could she get everything done if Sasha came in.

“Um, it's not a terribly good time, Sash. Josh and I are going out tonight and the babysitter is due any minute.”

“Babysitter? On a school night? You are a dark horse. Going anywhere nice?”

“Not really. We'll probably just go to a movie or something.”

Once it was out, she wished she hadn't said it. It was one thing to avoid telling Sasha that they were going to meet Sienna, but another entirely to invent an outright lie. For a second she thought about taking it back, and telling her the truth, but now she'd missed the chance of throwing it in casually, it would become even more of a big deal.

Sasha shrugged.

“Oh, well. Have fun,” she said, turning away.