My hair is jagged and short, like a child who’s found a pair of scissors for the first time. There’s no style – it’s been slashed into sharp angles and, for the first time I can remember, is cropped enough that my ears are on show. I stare at myself in the mirror but it doesn’t look like me. I have to touch my face and my hair to know that it’s really me and that there isn’t some sort of trickery. There is still a sharp pain on the side of my neck close to my scar and, when I half turn, there are two small red dots imprinted into my skin.
‘In here,’ Jane calls.
I turn from the mirror to see that she’s no longer in the living room and then I follow her voice into the kitchen, where my chopped hair is on the floor.
‘I don’t know what happened,’ I say as I stare.
‘Is Norah OK?’ I ask.
There’s a dawning second where Jane’s eyes widen and then, without a word, she skips past me and bounds up the stairs. I should follow and yet I’m transfixed by the hair on the floor. It’s not even necessarily how ridiculous I now look, it’s that this feels like an invasion. I can’t quite process what’s happened.
There is the sound of more footsteps on the stairs and then Jane reappears. She peers down to the hair and then back to me.
‘Norah’s fine,’ she says. ‘She’s asleep. I rolled her over to make sure she’s unharmed – but she is untouched…’
She scans across me and there’s an obvious implication that I’m not. I still feel a little unsteady.
‘What happened?’ I ask, partly to myself, partly to her.
Jane shifts onto one of the dining chairs: ‘I heard noises outside,’ she says. ‘I went to the window and there was someone at the end of the drive. It looked so much like David that I didn’t know what to do at first. We stared at each other and then I went to the front door. By the time I’d opened it, he’d gone.’
‘What time?’
‘Nine o’clock or so? I texted you not long afterwards.’
‘I came straight here.’
It took around twenty minutes to drive along the country roads from Little Bush Woods. If David sent me there for nine, it gave him a good head start here.
‘I thought I heard noises at the back,’ Jane says. ‘I went to the door and the next thing I know, you’re here.’ She stops and then adds: ‘How did you get in?’
‘The front door wasn’t locked. Not enough that anyone could see from a distance – but enough that it could be pushed open. I came in and then… I don’t know. I heard a noise, but then I woke up in your living room. I think someone stabbed something into my neck. I sort of remember shaking, but I’m not sure.’
I touch the spot on my neck without thinking, then I fill a glass with water and drink it down.
‘Let’s see,’ Jane says, and I tilt my head to the side as she peers closely at it like a mother with a child’s scabbed knee. ‘What do you think it was?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know. Maybe a stun gun? Something like that?’
‘Have I got them?’ She steps away and tilts her head back so I can see her neck.
There are a pair of similar dimples in the same place on her neck – but they are already fading, with the redness disappearing back to the regular colour of her skin.
‘Sort of,’ I say.
‘Could it be David?’
Jane has finally asked the question specifically. He’s dead – and yet I saw him, too. Someone’s been texting me. I can hardly tell her that I rolled his body into a lake. She thinks he disappeared.
‘Why would he do this?’ I say, trying to think of something better.
‘I don’t know.’ She pauses for a second, glances away momentarily and then adds: ‘I suppose I was never quite sure why he left. Did you have an argument? Did something happen between you…?’
She reaches inside her top and scratches her shoulder. It’s something done so absent-mindedly that I almost miss it. The mole she was supposed to have removed is still there. Jane catches herself scratching, but, by then, it’s already too late.
‘One of the surgeons was off,’ she says. ‘Some sort of miscommunication. I’ve got to go back.’
I’m not sure precisely why, but it’s as if a switch has been flicked. It’s not even the fact she still has the mole, it’s more the way she phrased her questions about David. We’ve talked about reasons for him leaving before. I’ve always said I didn’t know – because that’s all I have. This time, she was pushing the points specifically.
We lock eyes and there, in that moment, I know.
Not only that, she knows that I know.
‘Norah,’ I say, quietly.
Jane’s eyes narrow: ‘What about her?’
‘When I woke you up, she would have been your first concern. Not my hair, not whether David was around – but Norah.’
Jane is silent for a moment. After everything, it’s her own daughter who has caught her out.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ I say. ‘All of this was you. David. Everything.’
Jane bows her head slightly and bites her lip, before pushing up until she’s standing with her arms folded. Her features are fixed and unblinking.
‘Well,’ she says. ‘It took you long enough…’