than the absent, possibly philandering husband. He disappears in the middle of the night and yet there’s something wrong with me?
Did he know who was out there? Was that why he wouldn’t go and look? Karen’s words came back to her as clearly as if her friend was sitting beside her. You really haven’t noticed anything unusual? Any signs that someone has been in the house, watching you and the baby …?
Eleanor felt sick at the very thought. She hadn’t noticed anyone, but would she? She was always so busy, her attention taken up by one or other of her children. Would she spot someone walking behind her or watching them from afar? Karen must have had a good reason to say it. What did she know?
But it couldn’t be anything like that. The noise from outside was like Adam said, someone walking their dog, or kids on their way home from the park. Nothing more. Because if he knew there was someone out there, he would put a stop to it. He would never put their family in danger.
25
I went to her house.
Afterwards I sat in the lay-by at the end of the street, seething quietly at my stupidity, at my total disregard for the rules I had set myself. Your life, I told myself through gritted teeth, is defined by the rules you have vowed to abide by. If you lose sight of those, you lose everything. It could all come slipping down round you, the snowdrift that is your life becoming an avalanche that will bury you alive. It wasn’t the fear that I could have been caught that caused self-loathing to bubble under my surface like tar on a hot road – when you have had the worst possible thing happen to you, that kind of fear is as ridiculous as being afraid of monsters under the bed. I hadn’t been caught. But I had lost control.
The house was as different to mine as our lives were to each other. This home welcomed you towards it with a magnetic pull; even empty you could practically smell the freshly baked bread and hear the sounds of children’s quickly forgotten squabbles. Sounds that had choked and suffocated him, I tried to remind myself.
There were no cars on the drive, but still I approached with apprehension. I had no desire to rush this. I wasn’t looking for anything specific here, I just wanted to look.
I’d kept the key in my hand throughout the entire journey, its warmth and the way it sat comfortably in the creases a silent affirmation that I was doing the right thing. That this was long overdue and I couldn’t avoid her forever. I’d expected it to refuse to turn in the lock, unwilling to betray its master and let the enemy over the threshold, yet it had slid smoothly in and turned without resistance the first time. I stood for a second with my hand on the door handle and my mind stuck in that place between before and after. I was still closer to before; there was still time to walk away from this place with my discipline intact. The minute I pushed open that door it would become after, and I would have to consider at some point what that meant for me, how far I would slip and whether I could pull myself back from where this was all heading.
But I knew myself, and I knew, even as I hesitated, that I wouldn’t have come here if I hadn’t fully intended to walk through that door. There was a big part of me that had wanted her to be home so I wouldn’t have a chance, but now I was here and the house was empty. Better just to get it over with, rip off the plaster without stopping too long to think about the pain it might cause.
The hallway was sparsely decorated – built to be family functional, with coat hooks that each held one coat and a shelf for the post. I turned my face from the crisp white envelopes ripped open at the top and the letters crammed back in the rush of the school run. The thought of seeing his name on them in this place that felt so unlike him caused my stomach to cramp uncomfortably.
I lifted a man’s jacket off the hook. A heavy wax jacket, expensive and functional, the kind of thing you’d wear to walk a pack of dogs across the countryside on