Trust Me - T.M. Logan Page 0,102

to leave here. To leave this house, take Mia away with you.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Dominic Church. He said . . . Mia would still be at risk as long as she stayed here.’

‘He’s got a bloody nerve after how he treated Zoe.’ Angela’s fists clench in her lap. ‘Still trying to control her life, control Mia’s life, even now. Trying to tell us what we should and shouldn’t do. Kicking him out of her life was the best decision she ever made.’

‘How’s Zoe coping, Angela? She’s heard about Kathryn?’

Angela turns her head to look away, the skin tight along her jaw. A ringing reaches us from somewhere else in the house. A landline phone, its noise echoing down the hallway, intrusively loud against the quiet. It trills six times but she makes no move to go and pick it up.

Abruptly the trilling stops and silence is restored, falling like a blanket over the house.

Angela speaks without looking at me. ‘Yes, I’ve told her,’ she says. ‘Come with me.’

It’s a statement rather than a request. She pockets the baby monitor and stands up to lead me out of the lounge, down a long hallway lined with wooden picture frames perfectly spaced, one after the other. Images of Kathryn and Zoe as children together; a proud little girl hugging her baby sister, then kneeling on a sandy beach, at a school sports day, in fancy dress, cheek to cheek in paper Christmas hats, as teenagers with reluctant smiles for the camera, then Zoe in a black graduation gown arm-in-arm with Kathryn wearing her mortar board at a jaunty angle. Angela leads me past a book-lined study and another reception room, wooden floorboards creaking beneath our feet, past a downstairs bathroom and into another corridor.

‘This is the annexe,’ Angela says over her shoulder. ‘It’s just down here.’

At the end of the corridor is a single closed door, plain white, a viewing window set into it. She opens the door and I follow her into a large white room, sash windows looking out on the lawn on two sides. The sharp smell of antiseptic in the air. The room is dominated by a high single bed, metal-framed and complicated as if it’s come from a hospital ward, machines and monitors beeping and clicking beside it. Two monitors, one on top of the other, numbered displays in green and red.

In the bed, there is a young woman. Dark hair fanned out on the pillow behind her, her skin so pale it is almost translucent. There is a tube running into the back of her hand and a sensor clipped to the end of her thumb trailing a wire out of sight. A slow and steady beep beep from a screen next to the bed.

Her eyes are closed.

‘This is my eldest, Zoe.’ Angela goes to the bed and touches the back of a hand gently against her daughter’s cheek. ‘We had this annexe converted when we brought her home from hospital so she could be with us, after it happened. She’s much happier here at home. I won’t leave her, and I won’t leave Mia either. So we won’t run away, no matter how Dominic Church might try to frighten us away. We stay here. All of us, together.’

A woman in a starched blue nurse’s uniform appears from a side room. She’s fortyish and has a kind face, her dark hair pinned carefully back. Angela gives her a nod.

‘Why don’t you get yourself home now, Michelle? See you on Monday morning.’

‘Thanks, Mrs Clifton.’ The nurse peels off latex gloves and drops them in a yellow bin in the corner marked Medical waste – for incineration. She gives Angela a soft smile. ‘If you need me to come in tomorrow though, just let me know. It’s no bother.’

Michelle takes her coat from the back of the door and leaves the way we came in, her footsteps clicking into the silence.

‘She’s very good,’ Angela says when the room is quiet again. ‘Very experienced. She spent a lot of time getting Zoe settled, those early months. Making sure she was comfortable, getting her routines going. In fact, Michelle was the one who first realised.’

I move closer to Zoe until I’m standing by her bed, her palm laid flat on the crisp white bedsheet just inches from mine. The beeping of her heart monitor is the only sound in the room, steady and hypnotic, each pulse a gossamer thread keeping her tethered to life. I’m still here. I’m still