or open each other’s post. They voluntarily shared all the details of their lives without the other having to go over them beforehand.
However, all that had changed in the past few days, Chloe thought grimly. And it had not been of her doing.
She pressed the tiny buttons and the screen lit up. As she went to text messages and scrolled through, she breathed a sigh of relief. There was nothing in there apart from various short messages from friends – mostly about football. There were no hidden love-notes or secret expressions of rediscovered longing.
Yet she still couldn’t stop. She went into the phone book stored on the SIM and scrolled through the numbers. There was nothing in J except for ‘Jamie’ – Alex’s brother.
Her mind was already beginning to succumb to tiredness, soothed by the knowledge that her fears were unfounded. The buttons bleeped quietly under her fingers as she tried to get back to the screensaver picture of her and Alex. She found herself looking at his call log, and quickly scanned the numbers. Apart from calls to her, most were to clients, and there were a couple to Jamie. But there was one number that stood out. It was not converted from digits to a name, therefore obviously not a regular contact. He’d called it less than twenty-four hours ago.
Chloe’s heart fluttered as she stared at it. There was something familiar about it. She checked her own phone, and moments later, knew who it was.
Mark.
Why on earth was Alex calling Mark?
She flung the phone back onto the table, hating it for reaffirming her fears, and crept up to bed, rubbing her stomach gently. She opened the bedroom door as quietly as she could. It gave a tiny wail as it was pushed aside, then another one as she held the handle firmly and re-latched it.
Chloe tiptoed towards the bed, guided by the light of the streetlamp outside, and looked at Alex’s still form, then his face, to check she wasn’t disturbing him. She found his eyes – coal-dark in the dim light, but wide open, staring at her. She jumped slightly and took a quick breath, blinked and refocused. Now his eyes were shut and his breathing seemed even. She shook her head, wondering if she’d imagined it after all. But her heart was racing.
17
Mark was in the office early, keen to get a headstart on work this week, but his thoughts kept returning to his dad. He wondered if his father were still snoring his unshaven head off in Mark’s bed. By the time Mark had finished his dinner last night, Henry had shown no sign of moving. Mark had watched him for a while from his chair, and the longer he stared at the inert form, the more irritated he felt. Eventually he’d got up and given Henry a sharp poke in the ribs, which seemed to have no effect on his consciousness, but did cause him to curl up into a foetal ball.
At the movement, Mark had decided he’d had enough. He’d yanked hard on Henry’s arm, bending at the knees, his muscles straining as he pulled with all his strength to get his dad’s arm around his shoulder and heave him up into a sitting position. ‘Come on, Dad,’ he yelled. ‘For fuck’s sake.’
Henry had responded with a load of mumbled slurs, which Mark could make nothing intelligible of, but he seemed to have got through, as his father moved obligingly, and Mark managed to get him to his feet and propel him towards the bedroom. Once Mark had Henry sitting on the bed, he had let go of him, and his dad had immediately fallen smack back against the mattress like a dead weight. If Mark hadn’t been so cross and out of breath he would have laughed at the sight. It was too surreal. Henry’s mouth had opened upon impact and he began to inhale in gurgling snores.
Mark had taken his pillows from the bed and a spare blanket from the walk-in wardrobe, and dumped them in the lounge. He’d returned with a pint glass of water and the washing-up bowl – in case his dad felt like throwing up. To make sure Henry would see it, Mark left it on his father’s stomach, the bowl moving up and down gently with Henry’s breathing like a boat bobbing in the breeze.
Then he’d gone into the lounge, turned the TV up higher than was necessary, and nestled under the blanket, half-watching the screen while he flicked through his papers until he fell asleep.
When he’d woken up he’d had to go into his bedroom for clothes. Henry had moved in the night. The bowl was on the floor, unused, and the water glass was only a quarter full now. Henry was on his side, back to the room, breathing evenly, but Mark had the feeling his dad was awake. He was grateful for the pretence. He couldn’t even begin to frame a suitable conversation with his father since they had been thrust into such uncharted territory.
As he doodled on a legal pad, he wondered whether to phone his mother and tell her that her wayward husband had made an appearance, but he had no particular desire to talk to her either, since she seemed somehow to be holding Mark accountable for Henry’s actions.
He hadn’t got much done by the time everyone started arriving around nine. Half an hour later he got a phone call telling him one of his clients had decided to settle, which meant he didn’t have to go to court that afternoon, but also that quite a lot of the work he had been doing for the past week, not to mention that morning, had been a waste of time. Mark secretly loathed parties who chose last-minute settlements – they lacked the gumption to call proceedings to a halt early and save themselves money and their legal team time; and they also lacked the integrity to follow through on their cause. He was especially curt to the opposing party’s solicitor on the phone, and she ended the call having barely got out her final sentence.
A few hours later, he had just sent the temp running out of the office near to tears after he’d berated her for bringing the wrong case file, when David Marchant stuck his head round the door, glanced briefly at the secretary’s hunched, departing back, and said, ‘Everything okay, Mark?’
‘Fine, fine,’ Mark replied, leaning back in his chair nonchalantly, hoping he could replicate a confident, relaxed manner, which was in reality eluding him right now. ‘And you?’
‘All good.’ David came in and sank onto the chair opposite Mark’s desk. ‘I heard Dawson and Hamish settled.’
‘Yes,’ Mark said, smiling. ‘Eleventh hour.’
‘Oh well.’ David leaned forward. ‘At least you can shift that one along now, it seems to have been dragging on for an eternity.’
Mark had the feeling David was making small talk, and was intrigued. It wasn’t characteristic of his boss. He smiled and waited.
‘So,’ David continued, settling back into his chair again after a pause. ‘How’s Henry? We haven’t seen him round here lately.’
A-ha. Mark felt his shoulders stiffen and froze in an attempt to appear relaxed, then realised that was a dead giveaway. He began to shift a little in his seat. Neil and David seemed to accept his father’s frequent office visits, although Mark had managed to glean a few signs of irritation over the years when Henry overstepped the mark in company matters that really no longer concerned him. He usually dropped in to the offices once a week, and did the rounds, meeting and greeting people whose doors were open, offering advice where he felt it needed to be dispensed. When Mark heard his father talking to Neil and David, he was usually bragging about the heaven of retirement – long lunches after rounds of golf, afternoons at his club, where he dined and supped with former judges and barristers. It was obvious to Mark and, he presumed, others too, that his dad was struggling with an excess of spare time and a recess of status far more than he was admitting.
‘He’s fine,’ Mark smiled pleasantly, thinking of his father’s inert form in his bed a few hours earlier. ‘Just… busy, I think.’
One of David’s eyebrows twitched slightly. ‘Well, give him our regards, won’t you,’ he said, getting up.
Mark sighed impatiently once David had gone. His desk was cluttered with case files, but now he had nothing urgent he didn’t have any desire to look at them.
He thought of Alex’s phone call yesterday morning, and the piece of paper stuffed in his top right-hand drawer. He needed a distraction.
He looked at his watch. It was one o’clock. Her flat wasn’t all that far away. And he could drop off the Blythe documents to the barrister en route.
Don’t be an idiot, he berated himself. You’re not a love-sick teenager with bad acne any more. It was bad enough last time. You’ll just look like a stalker now.
Yet as he got up, his legs didn’t seem to be following his brain’s commands.
