Tears streamed down her cheeks. She didn’t often cry but with everything she’d had to contend with today, she couldn’t stop it. Still wrapped in her towel, she called her best friend Jilly, who lived a five-minute walk away. The pair had been friends since they met when Jilly’s son and Audrey had been in the same playgroup. Jilly had been there to pick up the pieces when Simon left, she’d babysat enough times so Sam could meet with her lawyer, she’d listened to Sam bitch and moan when Simon emigrated to New Zealand with someone else. Tonight Jilly let Sam vent over the phone, she listened, spoke in all the right places and was able to calm Sam down. Good friends, their lives were very different. Jilly had two sisters and two brothers who all lived within a twenty-mile radius, as well as hands-on parents who regularly visited the grandkids and interacted with them in a way Sam could only dream of. And she had a husband who worked hard but never neglected his family. A husband who was by her side every step of the way. What Sam would give for that kind of simplicity.
Sam went upstairs and got dressed. She sat on the end of the bed, the silence in the house almost too much to bear. When Simon left, one of the big things Sam had wanted was to keep her home, the bricks and mortar that gave her and Audrey stability. Audrey had had enough upset without having to shift schools, move into a new home, leaving behind the bedroom that had transitioned with her from the days of pale blue walls and fluffy white clouds to the black and white phase she’d gone through aged eleven and now, the metallic silver-dotted wallpaper she’d chosen for one feature wall along with three others in white with a hint of grey. Sam hadn’t wanted to take anything else away from Audrey and with hard work at her job, it was possible to stay in the house until Audrey finished her education. Then, when the dust settled, when Audrey was a grown-up and perhaps able to see and understand that it took two people to make a marriage work, Sam was planning to look for somewhere smaller and ease the financial pressure on herself. But now, redundancy had thrown everything up into the air.
Thoughts of her finances niggled Sam enough that in the end, she knew that if she didn’t look at them right now she’d go crazy waiting for Audrey, and so with a pen and pad, and her laptop open so she could bring up her bank account, she wrote out calculations on how long the redundancy money was going to tide her over.
As she suspected, it wouldn’t last long.
It was blindingly obvious she’d have to sell the house. Even if she landed a job in the next few months, the risk of keeping hold of this place was too high. Instead, she’d have to rent somewhere far smaller and in a different area for a while, to at least get rid of this one noose around her neck. She should’ve done it back when Simon left and Audrey’s life had fallen into pieces anyway, then they’d be settled somewhere else already, the mortgage a fraction of what it was now, the stress a fraction of what it was.
Sam moved from her calculations to looking at estate agent websites and rentals. Three bedrooms would be ideal and a garden, preferably detached with a driveway, but after half an hour of finding prices were astronomical, she’d narrowed her criteria to two bedrooms, semi-detached or terraced, anywhere within a five-mile radius of Audrey’s school. There was one, perhaps two, options and she sent off queries to both if only to have a look around while she organised the sale of this place. She couldn’t afford to be sentimental any longer; she had to be realistic. So before she could change her mind, she fired off two requests to estate agents to come and value her house, the home she loved.
Her head aching from so much time staring at the screen, she made a hot chocolate and moved back to the lounge where she stayed in the same chair until she heard the front door click open and shut quietly, and footsteps creep along the hallway. Audrey was halfway up the stairs before she turned and saw her mum sitting in silence.
‘I haven’t got school. I figured being late wouldn’t matter.’ She shrugged as though it was any other ordinary day, their conversation earlier hadn’t happened, and she and Sid hadn’t done something so stupid Sam wanted to wring both of their necks.
Finally Sam reached the end of her tether. ‘You’re grounded, for two weeks!’ she yelled. ‘You will not leave this house in that time, do you hear me, Audrey?’
Audrey was shocked but stood her ground and soon went back to acting like she didn’t care. ‘I figured you’d do that.’ She turned and took another step up towards the solace of her bedroom.
‘And no phone either,’ Sam hollered after her. That had her attention.
‘You can’t do that!’
‘I can and I will. And where have you been?’
‘I told you, the cinema.’
‘Do you want to tell me why you stole money from my purse?’
‘It’s my allowance.’ Audrey’s voice wobbled.
‘I told you, without my job, that has to stop for a while. And do you really think you deserve it this month? And who is Sid? I’ve no idea who this boy is and you go out with him until this time of night.’
‘He’s my friend.’ She pulled out her phone and showed Sam
