folded my arms, waiting. Then, quite unexpectedly, she smiled, transforming her rather grim face, making her look years younger.
“I was just going to say, you’re doing very well with those girls. Now, you’d best be getting a move on, or you’ll be late.”
* * *
As I drove back from Carn Bridge Primary School, Petra strapped into the car seat behind me, pointing out the window and babbling her half-talk, half-nonsense syllables to herself, I found myself remembering that first drive back from the station with Jack—the evening sunset gilding the hills, the quiet hum of the Tesla as we wound through the close-cropped fields, filled with grazing sheep and Highland cows, and over stone bridges. It was gray and drizzling today, and the landscape felt very different—bleak and raw and entirely un-summer-like. Even the cows in the fields looked depressed, their heads lowered, rain dripping off the tips of their horns.
When the gate swung inwards and we began to climb the winding drive up to the house, I had a sharp flash of déjà vu back to that first evening—the way I had sat there beside Jack, scarcely able to breathe with hope and wanting.
We swung around the final curve of the drive, and the squat gray facade of the house came into view, and I remembered too the rush of emotion I had felt on seeing it for the first time, golden and warm and full of possibilities.
It looked very different today. Not full of the potential for a new life, new opportunities, but as gray and forbidding as a Victorian prison—only I knew that was a kind of a lie as well, that the Victorian facade presented to the driveway was only half the story, and that if I walked around to the back, I would see a house that had been ripped apart and patched back together with glass and steel.
Last of all, my gaze went to the roof, the stone tiles wet and slick with rain. The window Jack had shut was not visible from here; it opened onto the inner slope of the roof, but I knew that it was there, and the thought made me shiver.
There was no sign of Jean McKenzie’s car in the drive—she must have already left for the day—and both Jack and the dogs were nowhere to be seen, and somehow, what with everything that had happened, I could not bring myself to enter the house alone. It had come to something, I thought, as I parked the car and unclipped Petra from her seat, that even fending off the dogs from trying to put their noses up my skirt would have been a welcome distraction from the silent watchfulness of that house, with its glassy egg-shaped eyes observing me from every corner.
At least out here I could think and feel and speak without watching my every word, my every expression, my every mood.
I could be me, without fearing that I would slip up.
“Come on,” I said to Petra. Her buggy was in the boot of the car, and I opened it up and slid her in, clipping the rain cover over her. “Let’s go for a walk.”
“Me walk!” Petra shouted, pushing her hands against the plastic, but I shook my head.
“No, honey, it’s too wet, and you’ve not got your waterproofs on. You stay snug and dry in there.”
“Puggle!” Petra said, pointing through the plastic. “Jumpin muggy puggle!” It took me a minute to realize what she was saying, but then I followed her gaze to the huge pool of water that had collected on the gravel in the old stable yard, and understanding clicked.
Muddy puddles. She wanted to jump in muddy puddles.
“Oh! Like Peppa Pig, you mean?”
She nodded vigorously.
“You haven’t got your Wellies on, but look—”
I began to walk faster, and then jog, and then with an enormous splash, I ran, buggy and all, through the puddle, feeling the water spray up all around us and patter down on my anorak and the buggy’s rain cover.
Petra screamed with laughter.
“Again! More puggle!”
There was another puddle farther around the side of the house and obligingly I ran through that too, and then another on the graveled path down towards the shrubbery.
By the time we reached the kitchen garden, I was soaked and laughing, but also getting surprisingly cold, and the house was beginning to seem a little bit more welcoming. Full of cameras and malfunctioning tech it might be, but at least it was warm and dry, and out here