The Apartment - K. L. Slater Page 0,35

puzzles that look attractive enough to put on display. Only when you get closer, you see something about it is just a little off-kilter, making it almost impossible to solve.

Later, when we get back upstairs after visiting Lily, I make sure the latch has engaged behind us. I glance down and see a piece of paper on the floor that’s clearly been pushed under the door.

I pick it up and turn it over and read the spidery black handwriting.

Skye may visit St Benjamin Monks at 10:30 tomorrow morning. Meet me in the foyer at 10:10 a.m.

Regards, Audrey

I marvel at the speed of this result after pleading with the school office myself and getting precisely nowhere.

It seems Mrs Audrey Marsden has quite a powerful reach around these parts.

20

Later, when I’ve put Skye to bed, I pour myself a gin and tonic and sit listening to a chill-out playlist on low volume.

It feels decadent with everything I’ve still got to do, but slowly, I feel the tension begin to seep from my bones.

This afternoon, for the first time in a long time, I saw my daughter forget her troubles for an hour or so, and become an ordinary little girl again with no worries.

Lily seems to have this way with her that just puts Skye at ease. There was no clinging to me nor snuggling shyly into my side. Lily brought out some beautifully illustrated bird books and the two of them sat together, leafing through the colourful images.

Lily pointed to a bird, and nine times out of ten, Skye identified it correctly within a second or two. Lily seemed genuinely impressed at Skye’s knowledge, and I prickled with pride as I watched them.

I’d never known my own parents and obviously had zero interest in making contact again with any of the families I’d had to endure growing up, so Skye had no grandparents from my side. Lewis’s dad died when he was a teenager, which only left June, his mother.

When Skye was around three years old, we noticed worrying behaviour from June. She’d constantly repeat herself when chatting and forget where she’d put important things like her purse and diabetes medication.

There had been a big move in the media to raise dementia awareness, and one day, when June had collected her pension in cash from the post office and called us in distress because she’d put it ‘somewhere safe’ and couldn’t recall where, Lewis and I just looked at each other and we knew.

The sad thing was, dementia had sunk its horrifying claws in but hadn’t got a real foothold yet. June still had periods of lucidity and would often realise she’d repeated herself or forgotten what she’d popped into Tesco for.

It was so cruel to witness.

Between us, we visited June twice a day and she came to stay with us for part of the week. Then, within a couple of months after leaving home, Lewis had inexplicably taken the decision to put June into a care home specialising in dementia.

I was heartbroken for her and tried to discuss it with Lewis, but he wouldn’t entertain the idea of bringing her back home.

‘Nothing to do with you, Freya,’ he said shortly when I tried to raise it. ‘Like Janine says, it’s for her own good.’

June died a few months later.

Still, it was so nice to see Skye enjoying that kind of grandmother-type connection today, with Lily.

I close my eyes and take a sip of gin, enjoying the delicate clink of the ice cubes as the liquid sloshes them together.

I suppose seeing the cold, unfeeling way my husband treated his own mother, I should have been prepared for what came next. But that wasn’t the case. Instead, he shocked me to my core.

When Lewis first moved in with Janine, about eighteen months ago now, we agreed to preserve certain boundaries when he came to pick up Skye for the weekend. He agreed he would ring the buzzer and wait outside until I gathered her things and brought her to the door.

We also agreed that when he brought her back home on Sundays, he’d text me to say they were outside, and I’d go out to bring her safely inside.

It might sound a bit of a rigmarole, but I was really struggling. I knew if he constantly came in to wait and sat in his regular armchair like nothing had happened, it would totally screw me up. So I asked him for his key and made it crystal clear that under no circumstances