Seven years earlier
Heidi’s flat is a studio. Despite the minimalist industrial look, there’s no way of disguising the fact that this is one room. Heidi is five foot and petite and looks as if she’s been designed to fit in this space, with its gleaming appliances and few but expensive pieces of furniture. Tom is a large man. From the bed, he can see every area, except inside the bathroom that nestles behind the wall.
Heidi is in the kitchen area making coffee and singing to herself. She’s wearing his T-shirt, which comes almost to her knees. Rachel is a lot taller than Heidi; his previous girlfriends – not that there were many – were also tall, and he likes the way Heidi fits into his arms when he spoons her. He’s keeping her safe, protecting her from the enemies outside. His enemies.
Tom saw himself as a man under siege in those first few weeks after leaving the family home and settling into Heidi’s flat. Although ‘settling’ isn’t an accurate depiction. He’s anything but settled. His children are never far from his mind, and he misses those precious hours when he’d get home from work and read them stories while Rachel soaked in the bath and had a window of respite from her day. Almost as difficult are the times when he wakes up at night, his body clock maddeningly regular, waiting for Josh to cry out for him, to need him. He misses his boy most of all, although he’d never admit that to anyone. Those moments were just about the two of them, pacing around in the half-light, the room occasionally lit up by the headlights of a car passing, the light picking out wisps of Josh’s baby hair, his tiny button nose. Now when he wakes in the middle of the night, he crosses the room in three paces and sits by the window, staring at the closed curtains, unfamiliar with the street behind them.
He knows they can’t stay here; already he wants to move, to get them a bigger place, but first he needs to discuss the house with Rachel. Hopefully they can do this face to face, otherwise it’ll have to be through a solicitor. It still feels too early and too confrontational to take such a step, though. Whatever happens, he has to stay close to the children, which means Heidi and Rachel will no doubt have contact. He has to find a way to make this work, but it will be expensive.
He’s also under siege from Freddie, once so familiar, now a stranger, with his new matter-of-fact attitude to Tom. To an outsider, nothing will have changed – they are polite to one another and work as well as they always have. But they are both taking on more individual clients now, instead of team projects.
He’s also a little suspicious of Freddie. Last week, he went into Freddie’s office when he wasn’t there, looking for a document on his untidy desk. He nudged the mouse with his hand, and when the screen came to light, he saw that Freddie was looking at the accounts, in particular the transactions Tom had made with the supplier the week before. He felt a chill creep down his spine. Freddie couldn’t suspect, surely? He told himself not to worry, that he had a good explanation, although his pulse was faster than it should have been and his chest felt tight.
He has started leaving the office early and going to the pub. The small flat is too oppressive, and he needs air and normality around him. Nothing about his situation is remotely normal, even though he chose it himself. It will get better, but that will involve a move, which means more financial pressure, and that means… Tom’s pulse races even faster. What if it isn’t his love life that is making Freddie pull away from him, but something far worse? What if Freddie knows what he has done?
Tom engaged a solicitor because he likes to have clarity; that way he can take control of at least some parts of his life. It’s a relief to have no mortgage, having unexpectedly inherited the house from his parents early in his twenties. He’d rather they were still with him, spending their hard-earned savings on cruises and holidays, or on spoiling their grandchildren as he knows they would have done, instead of having their lives ripped away from them in the car accident that ended his swimming career. Swimming was his father’s dream, and something they had always shared, and Tom couldn’t go near a pool for over a year after his death. Besides, he wasn’t as talented as his father had believed, and he’d never have won an Olympic medal – he’d known that for a long time. He hopes his boy will inherit his talent for swimming.
He could offer to help Rachel financially to get her out of the house, although that would mean uprooting the children and seeing them having to lower their standard of living. He wouldn’t stop paying for them, of course, but she can’t continue living in the house indefinitely without paying him some sort of rent. Realistically, she’ll need to get a job, otherwise she will have to downsize and possibly move away. The area they live in is expensive. Everything in her life will change, and he’s not sure he can put her through that. But without selling the house, he won’t be able to buy a place for himself and Heidi, and that is his number one priority right now. Her flat was OK when it was used for the odd sleepover, but not for them both to live in. Already he feels like a caged animal, prowling around a tiny space, peering through the bars at the outside world that he no longer feels part of. All his money has gone on the family expenses; his earnings are no longer enough to live comfortably on. He’ll have to apply for a mortgage, or a loan, and there are always his credit cards.
He hasn’t discussed any of this with Heidi; he doesn’t want to burst the bubble of their early days together. But the truth is, he’s finding it difficult to keep it from her.
He wishes he hadn’t more or less promised Rachel that she wouldn’t have to leave the house, though the relief he saw on her face told him he’d made the right decision. Afterwards, he cried, sitting in the car in a car park where nobody he knew was likely to see him, making him feel like a criminal.