48

Izzy gets up in the middle of the night. She has two missed called from Gabe, and three texts.

Nick stirs, but doesn’t wake, and she walks across the deep, soft carpet of their bedroom and downstairs.

In the kitchen, she stares out at the blackness of their garden. The fronds of the palm trees are completely motionless in the still, humid weather.

There’s movement outside. Izzy thinks of the text and the car and her hands go cold, but then she sees that it’s just Thea, letting herself out across the access and into her own garden.

Izzy unlocks her door and follows suit. It’s after two, and she throws Thea a look of surprise that she manufactures in the moment.

‘Can’t sleep,’ Thea says. ‘Just trying to cool down, but it’s impossible, isn’t it?’

‘It is,’ Izzy says, wishing that was all that troubled her: a bit of summer heat.

‘How are things?’ Thea says slowly. ‘You were saying – about your dad …?’

‘Oh, I think we can forget about that,’ Izzy says.

Thea nods, standing on her little patio, her feet bare on the flagstones.

‘I just felt …’ Izzy starts to speak, the warm, close night air and the darkness a kind of safe embrace, enabling her to unburden herself. ‘I was taken in by him, for a while,’ she continues. ‘I guess I just so wanted – a family. Like you have.’

‘Oh, Izzy!’ Thea says in surprise.

Izzy looks across at her. She’s in a towelling dressing gown of the kind not sold any more. It’s sage green, the belt double-knotted around her waist. Her face bears the expression of a slow realization. She is no doubt cycling back through the things Izzy has done, the way she has imposed herself upon their family, dropping by too casually, too often, full of excuses about why she was there.

‘But you can make your own family,’ Thea says, taking a couple of tentative steps towards her. ‘Now that you’re an adult. You can leave it all behind you.’

Izzy steps towards her and – unthinkingly, it seems to her – Thea holds her arms up and Izzy steps into the embrace that she’s craved. Thea doesn’t smell like her mother or feel like her mother but she is a warm body and her grasp is firm. She stands there with Thea for just five minutes.

Five motherly minutes.

Later, still not asleep, she finds the printout of her father’s previous conviction and scans for the name.

Barbara Johnson.

She types her name into Facebook and scrolls and scrolls until she sees what she’s looking for.

Barbara Johnson. Profile photo: a woman in her sixties, wrinkles around her eyes, sunglasses on top of her head.

A redhead.

Izzy sits up straight in bed the next morning. She has been woken by something, though she doesn’t know what. Only that it is something.

Nick has gone to work, and she sits for a second, listening to the complete silence of their cottage.

They had made love last night, Nick’s dark eyes on hers.

She peers out of the bedroom window. It was just a fox. Her entire body relaxes.

They often get foxes in their garden. They were both up early a few months ago. It was a misty spring morning, a chill on the soles of her feet as she made coffee. As she flicked the kettle on to boil, the light of it glowing blue in their kitchen, Nick came up behind her, and pointed outside. ‘Look,’ he said. It was their first spring in the cottage, and they were still learning about it. How to run the Aga; what grew, and when, in the garden; the noises the ancient floorboards sometimes made.

Izzy followed his gaze.

There was a fox in the garden asleep, inexplicably, on their garden table.

‘Oh!’ she said.

‘And look,’ he said, pointing again.

There was a second one, in the grass. It ambled up, on shaky legs, and headed for their back gate, where it must have come through.

The other fox remained sleeping on the table as they watched it. She couldn’t stop looking at him as she poured the water into their mugs.

‘What’s he up to?’ Nick said, poking his head into the kitchen later, and they stared at the fox for a little while longer.

It had been one of those mornings, she supposed. One of those mornings that stood out because it hadn’t been ordinary. But there was something else, too. The warmth of his body next to hers. The way he touched her hip to get her attention. The way they had laughed at the foxes, and they had texted about them throughout the day. Will he still be there when we get back? she had asked as she ate soup at the restaurant, and he had responded immediately: Hope so!

It had been sweet, sipping her soup and smiling at text messages from her husband.

When they returned home, the foxes had gone, of course. And they had never been back. But Izzy has never forgotten that day. It had been right somehow. Just right.

It was just a fox.

But that’s when she hears the noise again. Footsteps.

There’s somebody downstairs, in her house.