Evening arrived and we sat together in the living room, but even though we were in the same space we might as well have been miles apart.
I looked to where Paul sat. He’d been glued to his iPhone for the last half-hour. We’d barely spoken since our argument earlier. There’d been no discussion on further options. He’d even left the room when the police arrived to pick up the flowers. Molly had looked on open-mouthed from the top of the stairs as the two uniformed officers came into our house.
‘Is someone going to jail, Mammy?’ she’d asked, sliding down the stairs one at a time on her bottom and looking at me with trembling lips.
‘No, pet. No one’s going to jail. These lovely police officers are just taking these flowers to give them to someone who doesn’t have any. Sure, look at us, we’ve two bunches.’
She might only have been three, but she was a smart kid and the look she gave me screamed ‘I don’t believe a word you’re saying, Mum.’
‘They need to be careful not to squish them,’ she’d said solemnly as they were slid inside an evidence bag. ‘Nobody wants squished flowers. You always have to be careful ’cos the petals can fall off and the flowers get broken. You can’t fix flowers with glue, Mammy. You told me that before.’
I nodded, lifted her up into my arms. ‘That’s right. You smart cookie.’
She was in bed now. Beth sat at the other end of the sofa to me. She’d been clingy; not disappearing to her room as she normally did or asking to meet her friends in the park. Instead, she was lost in the world of Snapchat. I was staring aimlessly at the TV but nothing was going in.
I looked at them both, my family. I’d die for Beth, I knew that. For Molly, too. I’d do whatever I needed to protect them. At one stage I’d been sure I’d die for Paul as well, and him for me. Would I still? Would he want me to? Would he care if I’d been the one found lying on the side of the road and not Clare?
I chided myself. Of course he’d care. He wasn’t a bad man. I’m sure it would hurt him; but would he be driven mad with grief for me? I doubted it. That made me so incredibly sad. Could I pinpoint where it had started to go wrong? I wasn’t sure there was one event, one cataclysmic explosion of something that broke us. I think we’d just been chipped away at over the years.
We were very good at pretending, though – we could act the part. We could act the part so well that sometimes I wondered if I was acting at all. Sometimes I believed my own hype and a surge of hope that we could save what had resurfaced, but it was never long before old patterns re-emerged.
Until we found ourselves, once again, on opposite sides of the sofa and opposite sides of the relationship spectrum. Maybe that was why I’d been drawn to Michael – to that promise of passion and desire. To someone who listened to me intently, who looked at me as if I were the most fascinating creature who ever walked the planet. When he kissed me I felt alive. My body tingled and I’d been so completely numb for such a long time that I welcomed it. Even though I knew it was dangerous.
There was a big part of me that didn’t care about the danger. Life was for living and who knew what was ahead of me, anyway? An early death like my mother’s? Years of battling cancer to leave the world in my sixties? That didn’t seem so far away now that I was in my forties and the years seemed to speed by at an increasing pace.
And then there was Clare – gone, too. All those years she’d wasted her energy on trying to save her marriage with James, all the times she’d let him hurt her. If she’d known she only had a few years left, would she have tried so hard? When he didn’t make her happy anyway. When he didn’t make her feel alive.
But then, Michael had the power to hurt me, too. He’d told me he’d never felt this way about anyone before and then, almost in the next breath, he’d told me we needed to cool things. The same old ‘It’s not you, it’s me’ trope jilted lovers have been listening to for so long. He wanted to give me space to grieve. To be there for my family. Or maybe he’d just got what he wanted. The sex we’d had wasn’t worth the drama my life had become.
Looking around the living room – Paul still on his mobile, Beth, too – I wondered when they’d be there for me. I needed someone to be there for me, to care about how I was feeling.
I could feel something rise up inside me. I needed to get out of this house.
‘I think I’ll go for a run,’ I said.
Two heads looked up at me simultaneously.
‘You can’t do that!’ Beth cried.
‘I don’t think that’s a sensible idea,’ Paul said.
‘Why not? I need to get out and clear my head and burn off some of this nervous energy. It’s still light. A few kilometres and I’ll feel better for it.’
‘But, Mum, it’s not safe,’ Beth said, shuffling closer to me, wrapping her arms around my waist.
‘Beth’s right,’ Paul said. ‘You’ve spent the afternoon telling me the police are putting extra measures in place because there might be a crazy person on the loose and you want to go out running on your own?’ He raised an eyebrow.
‘I’ll take the car and drive to the riverside. There’ll still be loads of people around. I’ll stick to the walk along the quay. It’ll be jammed with the weather being so nice. Safety in numbers,’ I said, although even as I spoke I felt my own nerves resurface.
The thought of a crowd of people may well provide a safety of sorts, but I didn’t know who this was. I didn’t know who was trying to scare me. I could brush past them in a sea of people and not know. At the same time, I didn’t want whoever this was to make me a prisoner. I needed room to breathe, and in that house – the air thick with heat, and tension, I couldn’t relax.
‘I suppose,’ Paul conceded. ‘And if it stops you sitting there like a cat on a hot tin roof all night, it might be a good thing.’
‘I don’t like it, Mum,’ Beth said.
‘Your mum’ll be fine,’ Paul said. ‘And sure, she’ll have her phone with her at all times, won’t you, Rachel?’
‘I will,’ I said.
‘Besides, when she’s out, we can watch some more of the TV series Stranger Things, since she refuses to watch it with us.’
Beth smiled nervously but seemed reassured by Paul’s words and his promise of some quality time together.
I went to get changed back into my running gear, no longer convinced it was a good idea but too stubborn to back down. As I tied the laces on my trainers, my phone beeped. Picking it up, I saw a message from Michael. I immediately felt a swirling in the pit of my stomach:
I didn’t think twice before responding. I simply asked him when and where.
Michael and I had met when he’d registered for a three-month creative writing class I taught at the local technical college. It was something I’d fallen into, but I found that actually I quite enjoyed it. My students were older than the truculent teenagers I stood in front of every day in my day job and they had a genuine enthusiasm for what they were doing.
Michael caught my eye as soon as he walked into the classroom. He was tall, his hair messy, his hands pushed into the pockets of his baggy jeans. He looked mean and moody. Dark and brooding. As I’d have imagined a Heathcliff to look, perhaps. He looked nervous despite his cool appearance and he took a seat near the back of the classroom before pulling a battered notebook and pen from his satchel.
He barely lifted his head as I spoke, taking notes furiously, his brow furrowed in concentration. At least half an hour of the class session had passed before I saw him look up for the first time and he looked intently at me.
I was struck by the vivid green of his eyes, so bright against the weatherworn tan of his skin. I found myself lost for words just momentarily, having to work at remembering what I’d been talking about.
But I’d put him out of my head that night, as soon as I got home and into the familiar routine of keeping the house running while Paul was in Belfast. It was only when I heard the words he’d written for his homework the following week, and the week after that, that I found my mind starting to wander to him more and more.
There was a rawness to his writing. An honesty to it. A grief behind it that made me want to hear more. That made me long for his turn to read, so I could hear the soft, deep lilt of his voice. When, three weeks in, he’d asked me for some feedback on a one-to-one basis, I found myself agreeing to coffee with him after class. A part of me knew I shouldn’t. Even though he was an adult, and even though this was just an evening class for fun, he was still my student. It was still against the rules. But a bigger part of me couldn’t resist.
I drove to the lay-by on Foyle Bridge at the top of the walkway down to Bay Road Park. Michael’s car was already there and I felt my heart quicken.
When I climbed into the passenger seat beside him, he reached out his hand to mine, tanned, strong. I hesitated just a moment before I responded. I didn’t know why he wanted me here when this morning he’d been so sure we should give each other some space.
‘I know what happened this morning, but I just got scared, Rachel. All this – it’s intense,’ he said, looking straight ahead at the trees in front of us.
He seemed nervous. Jittery. I wasn’t sure how to respond to him. If he was already freaked out by what was going on, what would he make of the flowers, the strange notes, the concerned police …?
He turned to look at me and on feeling his gaze I felt tears prick at my eyes.
‘It is intense and I’m scared too, Michael. About everything. I shouldn’t even be here. My family think I’m out having a run, but I’m here because you make sense when not a lot does at the moment. I could easily just run away from it all and not look back. Ever since my mother died, that’s all I’ve wanted to do. But I can’t and things just keep getting worse. And now Clare …’
‘Don’t run away,’ he said intently, reaching across and cradling the side of my face in his hand, tilting my head so that he was looking directly into my eyes. ‘Don’t ever do that. Not without me.’
It was magnetic, the pull he had on me, and I let him kiss me and take my mind away from all of my worries and all the horror in my life. He was what I needed to get through this.
‘Can’t you stay with me tonight?’ he asked, his voice strained with desire as his lips brushed against my neck. ‘I guess I know the answer, but I have to ask.’
I threaded my hands through his. ‘I wish I could … but things are even worse now than they were before. Michael, the police suspect, or are at least looking into the possibility that someone’s trying to spook me, and Julie, too.’
‘What? Why?’ He shifted in his seat. Looked alarmed, held my hand a little tighter.
I explained to him about the flowers, about the notes and the rhymes – the possible link to our friendship.
‘And they think the killer might be behind all that?’
‘I suppose. I don’t know. I mean, they haven’t ruled it out and they’ve put on extra patrols.’
‘So they’re taking it seriously by the sounds of it,’ he said. ‘Rachel, you know, we could do it. Run away. Get away from all this. You don’t have to stay.’
How I wished it were that simple.
‘If only,’ I told him. ‘Where would we run, Michael? I have daughters, a job. A mortgage. You’ve a house, a job. We can’t just walk away from everything, not really. It’s nice in theory, but …’
‘Bring the girls. We can all make a new start.’
I shook my head. How simple he made it all sound. The girls had school. Beth was getting ready to sit her GCSEs.
He ran his fingers through his hair and then slammed them on the steering wheel. ‘This is bullshit!’ he said and I shrank back from him. He shook his head. ‘I can’t protect you. I can’t be with you. You might be in danger – real danger, Rachel, and there’s nothing I can do about it.’
‘The police are doing all they can,’ I assured him. ‘I’m sure it’s probably just someone trying to get a rise out of us. The police officer who came to speak to us, she says these kinds of things bring all sorts of weirdos out of the woodwork. Some people just see it as a game.’
‘It’s only a game if no one gets hurt,’ he said, staring ahead of him. ‘This doesn’t feel like a game. You’re not a chesspiece, Rachel. You’re someone I need to be okay. I need you in my life. In whatever way I can. Be it five minutes at a time, or half an hour here or there. I just want to take care of you.’
He leaned across and kissed me then, his lips soft, breath warm. I could have lost myself there, in those moments, but for the sound of the engine from another car as it pulled into the lay-by and parked a short distance from us. We pulled apart, my heart thudding. We shouldn’t have been so careless. Cars came and went here at all hours, people parking while they walked their dogs or went for a run. I looked over at the car. There was something familiar about it. Blue, dusty. I couldn’t place it but I was sure I’d seen it somewhere recently. I tried to glimpse the figure behind the wheel, but whoever it was had concealed themselves well. A hoodie pulled up over their head. Totally unnecessary in the current weather. I felt uneasy.
‘I think I’d better go home,’ I said to Michael. ‘They’ll be starting to wonder where I am. And we really have to be careful.’ I nodded my head in the direction of the blue car.
Michael glanced at it.
‘Probably some pervert trying to see if he can watch some couple getting lucky,’ he said.
‘Still, I’d better go home,’ I told him, squeezing his hand.
He looked dejected but told me he understood. Told me to take care and to stay in touch. He added that he’d always be there for me, whenever I needed him. I just had to call.
I got out of his car and crossed to my own, glancing back at the blue car, which still had its engine running, the driver sitting in the front seat, watching.