Steph wasn’t sure how much time had passed. She’d been sitting in the church growing colder and colder, a swampy odor rising off her damp clothes. The stained-glass window had darkened in front of her, as if the figures it depicted had been put to bed.
She was haunted by Paul’s collapsed face when she’d asked her question. Had she hit on the truth, or was he just devastated she would think that of him? His phone kept going straight to voicemail, reminding her of Thursday evening, the start of it all, when she’d been trying to reach Freya. A similar feeling clawed at her now, a sense of menace she couldn’t quite pin down. And a rising undercurrent of guilt.
Leaving the church, she walked back through the relentless rain. With every step, the guilt swelled. Hypocrite, the trees seemed to say as the wind shook their wet leaves, showering her with even colder droplets.
Paul’s car was gone from their street. Steph hesitated in the hallway of their building, hearing Heather’s and Brian’s voices above, gathering herself to go up.
She jumped when the door to the ground-floor flat opened and Emma emerged.
“Steph?” she said. “I saw you come in—God, you’re soaked.”
Steph wasn’t sure whether the moisture on her face was mostly rain or tears. Her muscles had begun to shiver uncontrollably. She felt too exhausted to protest as Emma ushered her inside her flat and settled her on a sofa. A mug of chamomile tea was pressed into her hands, its heat bringing sensation back to her palms. Steph wrapped Freya’s scarf around the outside of her knuckles, like a bandage.
Then she felt something soft brush her ear. With surprise she realized Emma had fetched a towel and was squeezing the wet ends of her hair. The gentleness made Steph want to lean against her. For the first time she saw her neighbor as motherly, and felt a twinge of regret that they hadn’t been friends before. It was surely impossible now. Their lives were intertwining only in the worst way.
Why haven’t you got any friends, Mum? Freya had once asked her, quite casually, but the question had taken Steph aback.
I have friends, she’d said. I’ve got my colleagues, and other mums from school . . . and my book club . . .
But in truth she wasn’t close to any of those people, and she’d only been to the book club twice before realizing she liked to read and think about books much more than she liked to talk about them while eating breadsticks.
Anyway, you’re my best friend, she’d said to Freya with a smile. You and Daddy. Freya had been thirteen then, still just young enough to look pleased by that comment rather than roll her eyes. Three sides of a triangle, they used to call themselves, telling Freya that it was the strongest shape, building pyramids of cards or bridges of straws to demonstrate.
Where did that leave Steph now, though? With nobody to confide in except her downstairs neighbor, a near-stranger, whose son had become inexplicably involved.
There was one other person she had considered calling in the midst of this crisis, but she’d always stopped herself. That was separate, that was . . . She couldn’t even think about it now.
“Steph,” Emma said quietly. “I need to talk to you.”
She moved the towel away and a draft snaked into the gap. Steph nursed her tea, noticing for the first time that the mug had a picture of Frida Kahlo on the side, looking fiery and fierce.
“My conversation with Zeb . . .” Emma said. “What I told you all, earlier . . . There was more to it, but I wanted to see you alone.”
Steph’s fingertips met around the mug. “What do you mean?”
Emma was flushing now, hesitating. Finally she said, “Freya thought you were having an affair.”
Steph’s lips parted. For a second she couldn’t speak. Then, “What?” she said stupidly, aware of her mouth hanging open.
Emma twisted the towel around her fingers. “She told Zeb she saw you somewhere when you were supposed to be at work. Maybe more than once. And that she’d noticed you acting strange, being secretive with your phone, telling little lies to her dad. I think she started trying to investigate . . .”
“Where?” There was a tight vibration inside Steph’s skull. “Where did she see me?”
“One time was during a driving lesson. She saw your car heading out of town.”
Steph felt like she was falling.
When you were supposed to be at work.
Telling lies to her dad.
Heading out of town.
“Zeb said she talked about getting her own car,” Emma went on, “as soon as possible, so she could follow you—”
“Follow me?”
“I think so. I don’t know much more, I’m afraid . . .” Emma’s head jerked as if she’d just remembered something else. “Except she mentioned a plan. Apparently she got upset, said there were parts she wasn’t proud of . . .”
“Was the plan to follow me?” Steph was short of breath and it distorted her voice. “Was that what she meant?”
“I don’t know. And I’m sorry I didn’t share this earlier. It’s just . . . all those people. I thought you’d want to know first.”
Steph raked a hand through her hair, pulling at the knots. The sneaking doubts that had chilled her as Paul had left the church were now surfacing as waves of nausea. Everything was shifting, reshaping.
It was she who Freya had felt let down by, her side of the triangle that had given way.
Not Paul. You.
Freya had been trying to follow her. For a moment Steph was sure she was going to be sick. As if she could tell, Emma passed her the towel. Steph held it over her nose and inhaled.
“She really told Zeb all of this?” she asked. “In that one night?”
“It seems so.”
“Where is Zeb?” Some part of Steph was trying to discredit the information, digging for a hint that Zeb was unreliable. Trying to shift the focus to Emma’s relationship with her child instead.
Because if this was true, it meant she’d failed in ways she couldn’t even comprehend right now. And Paul had absorbed the blame, was out there acting on it, when perhaps this was all on her. She had done this to their family and had refused to face up to the possibility.
“He’s staying with his dad,” Emma said. “They’re . . . getting to know each other.”
There was something guarded about the way she said it, but Steph was too dazed to process what it might be. Robin Lyle, she recalled hazily. Was he Zeb’s dad? The man in the hard hat, another stranger Steph had painted her own guilt onto. She stumbled toward the door, reaching for its handle, as though for an escape lever. When she got there, she paused and turned back. “Thank you for telling me,” she said.
Emma’s blue hair glowed like a gas flame beneath the lights. “I just hope she comes home, Steph.”
Steph felt tears building deep inside: the kind that might tear her in half if she let them out. “Could I . . . could I ask you not to say anything about this to anyone? I’ll take it from here.”
Emma nodded, and to Steph’s relief, she didn’t press for any more information. They looked at each other for a few more seconds, a silent contract forming between them.
Steph fled into the hallway and stood wheezing for breath, the potential scale of her misjudgments starting to take hold. She forced herself upright, walked out of the house, and got into her car. As she accelerated away, she ran through recent conversations with Freya, occasions on which she might have spotted her mum “somewhere she shouldn’t be,” or seen her shielding her phone, hiding a bank statement. Suddenly Freya’s silences at breakfast weren’t just late-onset teenage mood swings. The disappearance of kisses from the end of her texts was not simply a side effect of her growing up, or the petering out of their duvet nights in front of The Apprentice, their chats about books, their chats full stop.
And Paul was not the only parent with secrets that mattered.
How could she have been so blinkered as to think he was?
Steph was under no illusions about what it might have done to Freya, if she’d feared a threat to her parents’ marriage. She thought again of little Freya wearing her wedding veil around their first flat, accessorizing it with a pair of Paul’s shin pads, tripping over the trailing lace every few steps. And how she’d been so upset, so scared when Jess’s parents had split up—the first time it had happened to someone she was close to.
She still had one of our wedding photos in her room. Had Freya taken it from the album recently, while she’d been stewing over her suspicions? Or had she had it for a while, just because she liked it?
The deception would have wounded her too. The thought that her mum had been lying to her, to Paul, and at the same time cheerfully buying Freya daffodils, trying to continue with their mother-daughter TV nights, their banter about applying to the same universities . . .
As cars flashed past her on the motorway, Steph realized she was slowing. Because she was no longer sure this was the right thing to do, the right place to go. She kept imagining Freya behind her, in a Mini Cooper like the ones they used to jokily draw for one another.
Following her.
How far, exactly, might she have got?
At the next junction, Steph turned off. She circled an island and rejoined the M3 to speed back home. All the way, she irrationally scanned the landscape for some kind of sign from her daughter. If she’d been blind before, now Steph had to open her eyes.