What would happen if he confronted me? What would I say?
Sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore; where the line is between real and longed-for. Sometimes I imagine my husband demanding the truth, and me genuinely unable to answer because I no longer know.
When he finally slept I went to retrieve my papers from their temporary hiding place under Ruby’s bed. I should never have put them in the dining room last week. I should have shipped them straight out of the house, and I should have taken more bloody care to lock the cupboard so Leo wouldn’t have gone looking for them elsewhere.
This is how criminals get caught. They make mistakes under duress.
One by one, while Ruby slept, I removed papers pertaining to my degree, to my parents’ deaths, the police paperwork, to him. I removed the ‘sweetheart, you need to sort your life out’ letter Jill had written to me four years ago, after I’d gone missing and she’d driven up to Northumberland to rescue me. I took out anything that might make Leo think I was anyone other than his loving, faithful wife, and I cursed myself for not having been strong enough to get rid of all of it before. It was one thing hoarding a houseful of knick-knacks, but this paperwork? It was sentimental, superstitious; utter stupidity. Keeping it didn’t connect me to the unbearable losses of that time in my life. It just left me vulnerable to losing the beautiful family I had now.
Later, at work, an unknown number calls my phone. I’m with my coastal geohazards postgrads, talking about fluvial and tidal flooding in the Thames estuary. It’s warm outside and the windows are open: hard to imagine storm surges and submerged flood plains.
When I spot my phone flashing in my bag, I ignore it. But when it happens again I excuse myself and go out to the corridor.
‘Hello?’ I say, just as the line goes dead.
I check my missed call list. There are three of them, all in the last hour, all from an unknown number.
‘Oh, piss off,’ I say to my phone, but my voice is uncertain.
I’ve always felt that there’s something slightly malevolent about a missed call from a withheld number. But when it came up at a friend’s dinner party last year, I discovered I’m largely alone in this. Leo and most of our other friends declared themselves completely unbothered by the idea of an unknown person trying and failing to get through: it was only me and Stef, a friend from work, who seemed to find it unsettling.
Perhaps it’s just those of us with something to hide. Stef has had multiple affairs.
Before I return to my postgrads, I glance out of the window to the square, conspicuously empty now most of the undergrads have gone home for the summer. There’s just a couple of people eating sandwiches on benches, a girl walking up and down on the phone.
And a man, who appears to be staring up at the window I’m standing at. Not somebody I know. He’s scruffy; could easily be a student, but there’s something about him I don’t like.
His hat. He’s wearing a baseball hat. Like the man in Plymouth, like the man outside our house.
I glance along the corridor, but there’s nobody else standing by a window. Nobody else he could be staring at.
My skin prickles; something cold opens in my chest. Is he looking at me?
By the time I return to the room with my postgrads, he’s walking away. I catch the back of him heading out towards Gower Street, and he doesn’t return.
I’m more vigilant than normal when I leave the building at the end of the day, but I’m surrounded only by the silent flow of people leaving Bloomsbury, eyes glued to their phones, nobody talking. Nothing feels quite right.
I don’t want to be here. I want to be by the ocean. Somewhere vast and ethereal with the sun making wrinkled skin out of the surface of the sea.
Next week. Next week is Northumberland, with its huge skies and happy tides. With Ruby, with the sea: closer, perhaps, to him.