At first it seems my prayers have been answered. No Rachel, and no builders either. For once, the house is blissfully silent. When I lift the lid off the bread bin, though, there is nothing but crumbs, a crumpled paper bag. Daniel never eats breakfast. It must have been Rachel. I flick the kettle on so forcefully I nearly knock it off the base.
As the kettle boils, the phone rings. I snatch it up.
‘Mrs Thorpe, this is Monique calling regarding your remortgage. We have been trying to –’
‘Listen,’ I say, ‘there’s no remortgage on this property.’
‘OK, can I just ask you a couple of security questions and then we can discuss –’
I sigh, slam the phone down. Isn’t there some kind of law against this sort of cold calling nowadays? I think about searching online for what you can do, how you can stop them. But the thought evaporates as the kettle flicks off and my stomach groans. I pull the fridge open, reach for the milk. But the carton is empty. Rachel. I toss the carton into the recycling. Where is she, anyway?
I find the door to the spare room slightly ajar. Through the crack, I can see plates piled up against each other on her bedside table, still bearing crumbs and smears of food. I push the door open to get a better look. It’s even worse than I suspected. Mugs of unfinished black coffee congregate on the chest of drawers, the one that is meant to double as a changing table for the baby. There is a pile of unfinished takeaway boxes there, too – slimy noodles, rice stained orange by the strange Chinese food she buys at places near the station. I glance left and right, though I know there is no one else here, then I step inside.
I wrinkle my nose. A stale duvet, unwashed clothes all over the floor. I step over a gold sequinned skirt, some black tights all twisted up with a pair of dirty red knickers. I unscrew the sash window, throw it up, breathe in the cold fresh air. The sky is white and overcast, flat as a bedsheet. I can see Monty skulking along the garden fence like a tightrope walker, stalking a wood pigeon.
I collect the mugs from the chest of drawers, pinching one between each of my fingers, and balance the plates on my arm. As I lean over for the final mug, my bump almost throwing me off balance, I see her battered suitcase. I had only noticed that later, the fact she’d brought a suitcase. After I’d said she could stay, I spotted it, sitting there in the hallway. She’d had it the whole time.
I consider the suitcase, clothes trailing out of it from all directions, as if a bomb has gone off inside. Underneath a crumple of leopard-print fabric, a smooth silver rectangle poking out of the top catches in my eye, a white plug and wire wrapped around it. It looks exactly like Daniel’s laptop. The one that’s gone missing.
I try to remember when it disappeared. A sick feeling gathers in my stomach. Surely not.
I set the mugs carefully back down on the chest of drawers, the plates beside them. With an effort, I lower myself down to the floor, first one knee, then the other. I extract the laptop from the suitcase, unwrap the wire from around it, and switch it on. It blinks into life, a generic loading screen. A scratch on the keypad that I’m sure I recognise.
The little blue bar is inching across the screen. It’s taking ages. She’s probably only gone out for cigarettes. She could be home any moment. I look around the room, in an effort not to focus on it, as if that might make it go faster.
But then I hear a key in the door.
‘Helen? It’s me!’
Rachel. I slam the laptop down, wrap the wire round again, shove it back in her suitcase. It’ll have to wait. But as I stuff it back in, something else falls out. Something red.
‘Helen, are you upstairs?’
I can hear Rachel’s footsteps on the stairs – she never, ever takes her shoes off. I grab the thing that fell out, snatch it up quickly. As I turn it over, my breath catches in my chest.
A small, crimson envelope, with nothing inside it. Just like the one I found at Rory and Serena’s. But this cannot be the one that went missing from my book. Because this one doesn’t have Rory’s initials on the envelope. This one bears just a single initial on the front.
W.
HELEN
‘Just tidying,’ I say, as she reaches the landing. My arms are full of mugs. We eye each other for a moment. I try to disguise my breathlessness.
‘Oh yeah,’ she says. ‘Sorry. There’s some plates in there, too.’ She pauses. ‘I’ll get them.’
I step to the side to let her pass, our eyes still locked. She walks past me, slowly, into her room, looking back at me as she closes the door in my face. The envelope feels hot in my pocket.