‘Top shelf,’ I tell him. I pick up my phone, put it down again. I’m impatient, sparking with nervous energy. My phone is an unexploded bomb.
I found you out, I want to say. Rattlesnake.
But I don’t say these things. I can hear William sobbing hoarsely in the kitchen. She’s not even dead yet! I don’t say that either. Of course not. Instead I go through and sit with him on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor and drink a brandy and carefully I tease the story out of him. We’re talking in whispers, even though the little box room above us – the one I’ve been tentatively referring to as our ‘future nursery’ since we moved in – remains resolutely empty, except for the teetering files and William’s weights in there, gathering dust. He cups his brandy in his hand, holds it close to his chest.
‘Alex found her at the bottom of the stairs. He said there was so much blood he was sure she was dead.’
‘What have the doctors said?’
‘They’re still there, running tests. God love the NHS.’ He groans. ‘Ah, Jesus. It’s so hard, Frances. She’s only in her seventies. It’s too soon for – for all this shit.’
‘I know, I know. Will you go down there, do you think?’
‘Not sure.’
He tugs at his hair, a habit I’ve seen before. My stomach curls a little. It’s a micro-gesture, and he’s unaware of it. Deceit. I’ve come to know it well.
‘You don’t have to decide yet. Get some sleep tonight if you can, speak to Alex in the morning. Things might not look so bad once you’ve got the right information.’
‘Knowledge is power.’
It certainly is, I think, venomously. Then, out loud, ‘Do you want to come to bed?’
‘Nah. I won’t sleep now. My brain’s rushing all over the place. Think I’ll get some work done. Do you mind?’
‘Of course not.’
One of the other things in the box room is William’s desk and computer, used mainly for his accountancy work and occasional game of online poker. It was the poker I was concerned about, initially. I’d discovered the slow-burning hole in our finances completely by accident, and even though he told me it was just a bad month for expenses I saw that little gesture again – one hand reaching to pull the ends of his hair – and I knew different.
After we sold our three-bedroomed house last year and moved to this one – smaller, cheaper, more comfortable – I started to put aside a little nest egg, carefully curated for ‘when the baby comes’. Once a month I add a bit more to the pot, and William does the same, so that when the day comes it’ll be one aspect we won’t need to worry about. Because that day has to be soon, right? Married two years, together for six. I’m thirty-three this year. It’s not a race, William keeps saying, we’ve still got time. Meanwhile the box room exists as an outlier, dust motes spinning in empty afternoon sunlight.
Thing is, I’ve started to notice that the nest egg is shrinking. First by a little, then a little more, and a little more. I’ve rarely checked the balance – as far as we’ve been concerned, it’s off-limits until the day my waters break and, besides, we have other money. It’s a saving, right? So, where’s it going?
Outwardly nothing has changed – mostly Will is still himself; a little dour, clumsy, shaky from too much coffee – and we’ve been talking about booking a holiday when my redundancy pay comes through, maybe to India or Thailand. But still, there’s that germ, the one that infects my whole nervous system. Something’s wrong.
The first day I went searching I hadn’t known what I was looking for, only that the sour, uneasy feeling in my stomach had got worse those last few days. His computer was switched off, the box files full of random paperwork labelled with his neat, blocky handwriting: Bills, Mortgage, Warranties. On his desk, beneath the piece of coral he uses as a paperweight, was a small stack of documents. I slid the top one aside with my finger, then the next and the next. Halfway down the pile I found something that caught my attention: a handwritten bill of sale for seven hundred and fifty pounds. The descriptor read only SSB (MM). The headed paper read Porters of Mayfair, the date written in heavy ink in the top left corner. Nineteenth of March. My eyes stung, and a pain blossomed in my stomach. I sat down in his chair, staring at the piece of paper as though I could somehow decode it. Something to do with the car, maybe? A repair? No, no. He would have told me. William told me everything. It used to drive me mad to hear the long, detailed litany of his day, particularly when I’d first left work and was bored stiff, but I wouldn’t have missed this, would I? No. I was scrupulous about our assets, particularly when we were more reliant on our savings than ever. I thought about the online poker again as I slid the bill of sale back into the stack of papers. SSB (MM).
Later that night, I curled into William on the sofa, my feet tucked beneath me, my head on his chest so that his heartbeat drummed against my cheek. He had a half-drunk bottle of beer in his hand. He smelled good, comfortable. I tilted my head up to catch his eye. He smiled down at me.
‘All right, babe?’ he said.
‘Sure,’ I told him.
And for a while, it was.
I didn’t want to know. Sealed myself in ignorance, cocooned by my defences. Easier that way. Safer.
But two weeks later my eyes rolled open as the alarm went off and I knew what was going to happen. Even as I scraped
