The Lying Game by Ruth Ware (34)

Rule Four

Never Lie to Each Other

‘ISA?’

Owen’s call as he opens the front door is low, cautious, but I don’t reply at first. I’m putting Freya down in her crib in our room, and I don’t want to wake her. It’s right at the tricky stage where she might sleep … or she might go for another hour of crankiness and fussing. She has been hard to get down tonight, unsettled by yet another change of scenery.

‘Isa?’ he says again, appearing at the door of our bedroom and when he sees me his face breaks into a huge grin, and he pulls off his shoes and tiptoes across the boards even as I frantically put my finger to my lips, signalling quiet.

He comes to stand beside me, his arm around my waist, and together we look down at this creature we’ve made.

‘Hello, sweetie,’ he whispers, but not to me, to Freya. ‘Hello, honeybunch. I’ve missed you.’

‘We missed you too,’ I whisper back, and he kisses my cheek and draws me out into the hallway, part shutting the door behind us.

‘I wasn’t expecting you for ages,’ he says as we go downstairs to where baked potatoes are cooking in the oven. ‘You made it sound like you’d be gone for days. It’s only Wednesday – what happened? Did things not work out with Kate?’

‘Things were fine,’ I say. I turn my back, ostensibly taking the potatoes out of the oven, but really so I don’t have to see his face as I lie to him. ‘It was lovely, actually. Fatima and Thea were there too.’

‘Then why are you back so soon? You didn’t have to hurry back for me, you know that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I missed you. But I didn’t get around to half the stuff I meant to do. The nursery’s still a wreck.’

‘That doesn’t matter,’ I say, straightening up. My cheeks are flushed with the heat from the oven. Baked potatoes is a silly choice for such a hot day, but it was all we had in the fridge. I put them on a board on the countertop and slice the sides open, watching the steam billow out. ‘You know that.’

‘It matters to me.’ He puts his arms around me, his day-old beard rough against my cheek, his lips questing for my ear, the side of my neck. ‘I want you back, all to myself.’

I let him kiss me, but I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that if that’s what he wants, he will never be happy. Because I will never be his alone. I will always be nine-tenths Freya’s, and what little there is left over, I need for myself, and for Fatima, Thea and Kate.

‘I missed you,’ I say instead. ‘Freya missed you too.’

‘I missed you both,’ he says, his voice muffled in my collarbone. ‘I wanted to call, but I thought you’d be having such a good time …’

I feel a twinge of guilt as he says the words, as I realise that I barely thought about calling him. I texted, to say we’d arrived safely. That was it. Thank God he didn’t ring – I try to imagine my phone going – when? During that long, painful dinner? During the fight with Luc? On that first night as we all gathered, full of fear about what we were about to hear?

It’s impossible.

‘I’m sorry I didn’t phone too,’ I say at last, disengaging myself and turning off the oven. ‘I meant to – it’s just, you know what it’s like with Freya. She’s so whiny in the evenings, especially in a strange place.’

‘So … what was the occasion?’ Owen asks. He begins to get salad out of the drawer, sniffing the limp lettuce and picking off the floppy outer leaves. ‘I mean, it’s a funny time to get together – midweek I mean. I can see it doesn’t make any difference to you and Kate. But doesn’t Fatima work?’

‘Yes. There was a dinner – an alumnae dinner at Salten House. They held it on a Tuesday, I don’t know why. I suppose because the school’s empty then.’

‘You didn’t tell me about that.’ He starts to chop tomatoes, slice by slice, the pale juice bleeding across the plates. I shrug.

‘I didn’t know. Kate bought the tickets. It was a surprise.’

‘Well … I’ve got to say, I’m surprised too,’ Owen says at length.

‘Why?’

‘You always said you’d never go back. To that school, I mean. Why now?’

Why now. Why now. Fuck. Why now?

It’s a perfectly reasonable question. And I can’t think of an answer.

‘I don’t know,’ I say at last, testily. I push his plate towards him. ‘OK? I don’t know. It was Kate’s idea and I went along with it. Can we stop with the third degree? I’m tired, and I didn’t sleep very well last night.’

‘Hey.’ Owen’s eyes open wide, he holds up his hands. He’s trying not to show it, but there is hurt in his face, and I want to bite my own tongue. ‘Sure, blimey, sorry. I was just trying to make conversation.’

And he picks up his plate and goes out into the living room without another word.

I feel something twist inside me, a pain in my gut like a real, physical pain. And for a second I want to run after him and blurt it all out, what has happened, what we did, the weight that is hanging around my neck, threatening to drag me down …

But I can’t. Because it’s not only my secret – it’s theirs too. And I have no right to betray them.

I swallow it down, the confession that is rising inside me. I swallow it down, and I follow Owen into the living room to eat our supper side by side, in silence.

What I learn, in the days that follow, is that time can grind down anything into a kind of new normality. It’s a lesson I should have remembered from last time, as I struggled to come to terms with what had happened, with what we’d done.

Back then, I was too busy to feel constantly afraid – and the whole business began to feel like a kind of vague nightmare, something that had happened to someone else, in another time. My mind was taken up by other things – by the effort of establishing myself at a new school, and by my mother, who was getting progressively sicker. I did not have time to check the papers, and the idea of combing the Internet for information never occurred to me back then.

Now, though, I have time on my hands. When Owen leaves for work, the door closing behind him, I am free to obsess. I don’t dare search Google for the terms I want – Body Salten Reach Identified – even a private window on a browser doesn’t mask your Internet searches completely, I know that.

Instead I search around the edges, terms carefully designed to be explicable, non-incriminating. ‘News Salten Reach.’ ‘Kate Atagon Salten.’ Headlines I hope will bring up what I want, but without a digital trail of bloodstained fingerprints.

Even then I erase my history. Once, I consider going to the Internet cafe at the bottom of our road, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Freya and I would stick out like a sore thumb among the earnest young men in their white robes. No. No matter what, I must not draw attention to myself.

The news is released about a week after I return, and in the event, I don’t need to search for it. It’s there on the Salten Observer website as soon as I log on. It makes the Guardian and the BBC news too, albeit a small paragraph under ‘local interest’.

It’s a shock – as I stand there, reading the paragraph again and again, I feel my skin prickle with it, and I have to steady myself against the table. It has happened. The thing I’ve spent so long fearing. It’s finally happened. And yet, it’s not as bad as it could have been. There’s nothing about it being treated as a suspicious death, no mention of coroners or inquests. And as the days wear on, and my phone doesn’t ring, and there are no knocks at the door, I tell myself I can relax … just a little.

And yet, I am still tense and jumpy, too distracted to read or concentrate on TV in the evenings with Owen. When he asks me a question over dinner my head jerks up, torn from my own thoughts and unsure what he said. I find myself apologising more and more.

God, how I wish I could smoke. My fingers itch for a cigarette.

Only once do I crack and have one, and I hate myself afterwards. I buy a packet in a rush of shame as we pass the offy at the corner of the road, telling myself that I am going in for milk, and then – almost as a pretend afterthought – asking for ten Marlboro Lights as I go up to pay, my voice high and falsely casual. I smoke one in the back garden, and then I flush the butt and shower, scrubbing my skin until it is pink and raw, ignoring Freya’s increasingly cross screeches from the bouncy chair just inside the bathroom door.

There is no way I am feeding my child stinking of smoke.

When Owen comes home I feel riven with guilt, jumpy and on edge, and at last, when I drop a wine glass and burst into tears he says, ‘Isa, what’s the matter? You’ve been weird ever since you came back from Salten. Is something going on?’

At first I can only shake my head, hiccuping, but then at last I say, ‘I’m sorry – I’m so sorry. I – I had a cigarette.’

‘What?’ It’s not what he was expecting, I can tell that from his expression. ‘Blimey … how, when did that happen?’

‘I’m sorry.’ I’m calmer now, but still gulping. ‘I – I had a few drags at Kate’s and then today, I don’t know, I just couldn’t resist.’

‘I see.’ He takes me in his arms, rests his chin on my head. I can feel him thinking what to say. ‘Well … I can’t say I’m thrilled. You know how I feel about it.’

‘You couldn’t be more pissed off at me than I am at myself. I felt disgusting – I couldn’t hold Freya until I’d had a shower.’

‘What did you do with the rest of the packet?’

‘I threw them away,’ I say after a pause. But the pause is because this is a lie. I didn’t throw them away. I have no idea why not. I meant to – but somehow I shoved them into the corner of my handbag instead before I went for my shower. I’m not having another one, so it doesn’t matter, does it? It all comes to the same thing. I will throw them away, and then what I’ve said will be true. But for now – for now, as I stand there, stiff and ashamed in Owen’s arms … for now it’s a lie.

‘I love you,’ he says to the top of my head. ‘You know that’s why I don’t want you smoking, right?’

‘I know,’ I say, my throat croaky with tears. And then Freya cries out, and I pull away from him to pick her up.

He is puzzled though. He knows something is wrong … he just doesn’t know what.

Gradually the days form a kind of semblance of normality, though small touches remind me that it’s not, or at least if it is, it’s a new normal, not the old one. For one thing, my jaw hurts, and when I mention it in passing, Owen tells me that he heard me last night grinding my teeth in my sleep.

Another is the nightmares. It’s not just the sound of the shovel on wet sand any more, the scrape of a groundsheet across a beach track. Now it’s people, officials, snatching Freya from my arms, my mouth frozen in a soundless scream of fear as she is taken away.

I have coffee with my antenatal group as usual. I walk to the library as usual. But Freya can feel my tension and fear. She wakes in the night, crying, so that I stumble from my bed to her crib to snatch her up before she can wake Owen. In the daytime she is fretful and needy, putting her arms up to be carried all the time, until my back hurts with the weight of her.

‘Maybe she’s teething,’ Owen says, but I know it’s not that, or not just that. It’s me. It’s the fear and adrenaline pumping through my body, into my milk, through my skin, communicating themselves to her.

I feel constantly on edge, the muscles in my neck like steel cords, perpetually braced for something, some bolt from the blue to destroy the fragile status quo. But when it comes, it’s not in the form that I was expecting.

It is Owen who answers the door. It is Saturday, and I am still in bed, Freya beside me, sprawled out frog-legged on the duvet, her wet red mouth wide, her thin violet lids closed over eyes that dart with her dreams.

When I wake, there’s a cup of tea beside my bed, and something else. A vase of flowers. Roses.

The sight jolts me awake, and I lie there, trying to think what I could have forgotten. It’s not our anniversary – that’s in January. My birthday’s not until July. Crap. What is it?

At last I give up. I will have to admit ignorance and ask.

‘Owen?’ I call softly, and he comes in, picks up the stirring Freya and puts her to his shoulder, patting her back as she stretches and yawns, with catlike delicacy.

‘Hello, sleepyhead. Did you see your tea?’

‘I did. Thanks. But what’s with the flowers? Are we celebrating something?’

‘I was going to ask you the same thing.’

‘You mean they’re not from you?’ I take a sip of the tea and frown. It’s lukewarm, but it’s wet, and that’s the main thing.

‘Nope. Take a look at the card.’

It’s tucked beneath the vase, a little anonymous florist’s card in an unsealed, unmarked white envelope. I pull it out and open it.

Isa, it says, in handwriting I don’t recognise, probably the florist’s. Please accept these as an apology for my behaviour. Yours always, Luc.

Oh God.

‘So, um … who’s Luc?’ Owen picks up his own cup of tea and takes a sip, eyeing me over the top of the cup. ‘Should I be worried?’

He makes the comment sound like a joke, but it’s not, or not completely. He’s not the jealous type, but there is something curious, a little speculative in his gaze, and I can’t blame him. If he got red roses from a strange woman, I would probably be wondering too.

‘You read the card?’ I ask, and then realise, instantly, as his expression closes that that was the wrong thing to say. ‘I mean, I didn’t mean –’

‘There was no name on the envelope.’ His voice is flat, offended. ‘I read it to see who they were for. I wasn’t spying on you, if that’s what you meant.’

‘No,’ I say hurriedly, ‘of course that’s not what I meant. I was just –’ I stop, take a breath. This is all going wrong. I should never have started down this track. I try – too late – to turn back. ‘Luc is Kate’s brother.’

‘Her brother?’ Owen raises an eyebrow. ‘I thought she was an only child?’

‘Stepbrother.’ I twist the card between my fingers. How did he get my address? Owen must be wondering what he’s apologising for, but what can I say? I can’t tell him what Luc really did. ‘He – there was a misunderstanding while I was at Kate’s. It was silly really.’

‘Blimey,’ Owen says lightly. ‘If I sent roses every time there was a misunderstanding I’d be broke.’

‘It was about Freya,’ I say reluctantly. I have to somehow tell him this but without making Luc sound like a psycho. If I say – bluntly – that Luc took my child, our child, away from the person looking after her without permission, Owen will probably want me to call the police, and that’s the one thing I can’t do. I have to tell the truth, but not the whole truth. ‘I – oh, it’s complicated, but when we went out to the dinner I got a babysitter, but she was a bit young and she couldn’t handle things when Freya kicked off. It was stupid – I shouldn’t have left Freya with a stranger, but Kate said the girl was experienced … anyway Luc happened to be there so he offered to take Freya out for a walk to calm her down. But I was cross he hadn’t asked me before he took her out of the house.’

Both of Owen’s eyebrows are up now.

‘The guy helped you out and you chewed him out, and now he’s sending roses? Bit over the top, no?’

Oh God. I am making this worse.

‘Look, it was a bit more complicated at the time,’ I say, a trace of defensiveness coming into my tone. ‘It’s a long story. Can we talk about it after I’ve had a shower?’

‘Sure.’ Owen holds up his hands. ‘Don’t mind me.’

But as I grab a towel from the radiator and swathe my dressing gown around me, I catch him looking at the vase of roses on the bedside table, and his expression is the look of a man putting two and two together … and not really liking the answer.

Later that day, when Owen has taken Freya out to Sainsbury’s to buy bread and milk, I take the flowers out of the vase, and I shove them deep into the outside bin, not caring how the thorns prick and rip my skin.

On top of them I shove the week’s rubbish in a plastic sack, pressing it down as though the accumulated garbage can cancel out the presence of the flowers, and then I slam the lid down and go back inside.

My hands, as I rinse them under the tap, washing away the blood from the thorns, are shaking, and I itch to call up Kate or Fatima or Thea and tell them what Luc has done, unpick his motives. Was he really trying to apologise? Or was it something else, more subtle, more damaging?

I even go as far as picking up the phone and bringing up Kate’s number – but I don’t call. She has enough to worry about, they all do, without me adding to their fears over what could be nothing but a simple apology.

One thing that bothers me is how he got my address. Kate? The school? But I am in the phone book, I realise with a sinking sensation. Isa Wilde. There are probably not that many of us in north London. It wouldn’t be that hard to track me down.

I pace the flat, thinking, thinking, and in the end I realise I have to distract myself from my thoughts or I will go mad. I go up to the bedroom and empty out Freya’s clothes drawer, sorting out the too-small Babygros and rompers from a few months ago. The task is absorbing, and as the piles grow I find I’m humming something between my teeth, a silly pop song that was on the radio at Kate’s, and my heart rate has slowed, and my hands are steady again.

I will iron the outgrown clothes and put them in the loft in plastic boxes for when – if – Freya has a baby brother or sister.

But it’s only when I come to pick up the pile and take it downstairs to where I keep the iron that I notice. They are stained, with minute pricks of blood from the roses.

I could wash them, of course. But I’m not sure if the bloodstains would come out of the fragile, snowy fabric, and anyway, I realise as I gaze at the spreading crimson spots, turning to rust, I can’t bring myself to do it. The things, the perfect, innocent little things, are ruined and soiled, and I will never feel the same way about them again.