Rachel exhales, a serious expression on her face. She picks up an apron that is hanging off the back of a chair, ties it around her waist. ‘Let me help,’ she says in a resolute voice, as if we are first responders at a terror attack.
‘There is no need, really,’ Daniel tells her. His teeth are clamped together, his jaw tense. He touches his glasses where they sit on the bridge of his nose.
‘I insist.’
Rachel bends down, deftly, mops up the pools of water, slides the freezer doors shut. It is clear that Daniel and I are equally stumped as to what we should say.
When the mess is cleared up, Rachel turns to me.
‘Do you want me to go?’ she whispers, glancing at Daniel, who now has his back to us.
I look at Rachel, then to Daniel, then at Rachel again, at the marks on her neck. I look out of the window. It has started to rain. Drops flick at the window like glass shards.
‘You should report him, Rachel,’ I say. ‘Whoever did this to you.’ I turn to Daniel. ‘Daniel, don’t you think she should go to the police?’
Daniel stares at me, then at Rachel.
‘Of course,’ he says.
Rachel meets his gaze, then looks back at me.
‘I’ll … I’ll think about it,’ she says. ‘But, Helen, please can I stay?’ She bites her lip, looks down at the floor. ‘Just one night. Please? I’ll be gone after that. I swear.’
Later, Rachel is comfortably installed on a fold-out bed in the spare room – the room that is soon to be our nursery. I wish we didn’t have to put her in there, but all the others are crammed full of furniture that has been moved from downstairs because of the building work. I lie awake, listening to the rain against the window. Daniel falls asleep, but I can’t seem to settle.
Unable to drop off, I turn the bedside light back on and look for my book, where I have been keeping the note I found in Rory and Serena’s bathroom, and the torn-up photograph I found in Daniel’s old box. But my book is not on the table, or in the drawer, or down the side of my bed.
A day or two later, I find the book on our kitchen table. I can’t work out how it would have got there. I’m sure I hadn’t taken it downstairs. And when I open it, I find that both the note and the photograph have gone.
35 WEEKS
HELEN
A week on from her arrival, there has been no mention of what Rachel plans to do next. We come home to find her damp towels coating the bathroom floor, circles on the woodwork from her coffee mugs. At breakfast, she saws wonky chunks of sourdough and squeezes them into the toaster, then forgets about them until the kitchen is filling with smoke.
With Rachel around, Daniel is here less and less. When he is here, his every movement betrays his irritation. He slams doors, makes loud banging noises while he empties the bins. Daniel keeps telling me I need to talk to her, ask her how much longer it’s going to be. I have told him that it won’t be more than a few days. That she is vulnerable, that I can’t just tell her to get out, when someone has so obviously tried to hurt her. But I’m now starting to wonder myself whether she is actually planning to leave.
For a woman fleeing a violent attacker, Rachel seems remarkably cheerful. I’ve tried to ask her gently once or twice about what happened. About who has been hurting her. But she just changes the subject, refuses to meet my eye, starts chewing on her cuffs, or her fingernails. She promises she will go, just as soon as she has found somewhere new to live – somewhere safe, she says, with a look that forces Daniel and me into guilty silence.
She claims she is flat hunting. But as far as I can see she spends most of the day on the sofa, playing pop music on her phone. She has a habit of skipping each track before it’s finished, which sets my teeth on edge. When we are trying to get to sleep at night, I hear the squeaking sound of her opening the old sash window in the spare bedroom to smoke. She doesn’t seem to feel the cold. With the window open, I can hear every footfall on the street below, shouts from the park, sirens on the Trafalgar Road. In the morning, you can feel the draught from under her bedroom door.
I’ve been at the hospital all afternoon for antenatal blood screening. They make you fast for it, to see if the baby has given you diabetes. Now I’m exhausted, and ravenous, the baby low in my belly, pressing painfully down on my bladder as I trudge home. The air is getting colder now, pinching at my cheeks as I step off the Tube. The whole way home, I think about the last bagel from the bakery that I saw this morning in the bread bin. I am going to smother it with butter, Cheddar cheese and chutney, and grill it, then devour it with a huge cup of hot, sweet tea and the remains of the Sunday Times. Please let Rachel be out, I think. Please.