She must have muddled her times because the estate agent is still here. Melissa experiences a blast of panic and has an urge to hide behind a car or simply turn the other way. She didn’t want any part in this process.
But it’s too late. They have all seen her. She tries to smile. Bertie tugs at the lead and gets twisted around her leg and she irritably untangles him until she is free again.
The estate agent looks like a schoolboy in his work experience clothes. His cheeks, so newly free of acne, have a scrubbed, almost boiled look. His shoes are shiny and pointed. A young couple are coming out behind him. Indian, she thinks. The woman is small with a prominent pregnancy bump and quick brown eyes. She looks like she would be fun. He is tall and bespectacled, serious and suited.
‘Here’s the lady of the house right now!’ says the agent. She can never remember his name. Kev or Keith or Kelvin. Something like that.
‘You have a beautiful home,’ says the man, very formally. The woman nods, too enthusiastically, and Melissa feels tired.
‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I was just going to …’ but she doesn’t finish the sentence. What was she going to do?
‘We actually had a question about the boiler,’ says the man now, leaning his head forward, brow furrowed. He begins explaining something she doesn’t really understand. She tries to answer the question, and he doesn’t seem satisfied but is too polite to say.
‘And the neighbours?’ says his partner before leaning in conspiratorially, still grinning. ‘Anything we should know? Any nosy parkers or party animals?’ She laughs as she says it, as though it isn’t important, but there is a sharp intelligence about her.
For a second, Melissa flounders and then manages to say, ‘We’ve never had anything like that, no. It’s a very good neighbourhood.’
Inside the house she rests her hand against the hall table and breathes deeply. She wonders what they would have done if she’d said, ‘Actually the woman next door is currently serving a life sentence for murder. But you can rely on her in a crisis and she makes decent cakes.’
She starts to laugh, deep from her belly but it feels unnatural in the quiet house, tidy as a show home. She stops and goes into the kitchen where the dog is waiting to go outside.
Opening the back door, she notices that his back legs seem to sag. An unexpected sadness washes over her.
‘Stupid animal,’ she murmurs and swallows a lump of grief back inside herself. That won’t be easy, when it comes. She’s grown quite attached to the smelly little beast. And Tilly loves him.
Melissa gets a glass and fills it from the filter before taking a long sip. She wonders if that couple will make an offer. The thought scares her a little.
They still haven’t made a final decision about whether they will buy two properties, possibly outside the M25. One for Melissa, one for Mark and Tilly. Or one for Mark, one for Tilly and Melissa. Nothing has been decided.
Tilly is studying for her A levels at a local FE college. They don’t have the money for boarding school anymore. Mark has had to take on extra shifts to try and recoup some of their losses. He turned down the offer of a new contract on BBB. He looks much older than he did a few months ago.
***
Melissa had stayed up all night when she got back from Cornwall, slumped at the kitchen table. She’d tried to get drunk but the vodka tasted bad and her stomach wouldn’t accept it.
By five the following morning she began repeatedly ringing Kerry’s number until the very groggy and bad-tempered mother answered. At first she hadn’t taken Melissa’s demand to know Kerry’s bank details seriously.
Melissa kept saying that she wanted to do this. That she should have helped Jamie when they were young and she should have helped him more recently. That she felt responsible for what had happened to him. She wanted to make it up to Kerry and to Amber. Suspiciously, the woman, Phyllis, found her daughter’s chequebook and recited the details Melissa needed.
It was then the work of a few keystrokes to transfer £20,000 – to Kerry. After this she looked up the charity Thomas Pinkerton worked for – an environmental group, it transpired – and made a donation of another £20,000. The rest of the money she donated to The Down’s Syndrome Association and the NSPCC.
Then she went upstairs and took the remaining diazepam in the bottle before lying down on the sofa and waiting to die.
They said afterwards that she hadn’t taken enough. But when Saskia called round the next morning on the way to work and heard the dog barking inside, she got Nathan to break a window and climb inside.
The police had been interested when they learned of this. There were too many strange conflicts swirling together over these two properties like a mini tornado. Dead men. Snatched children. Suicides and large bank payments, because, oh yes, they knew about that.
But there was no real evidence that Melissa had taken part in any crime. And there were only so many resources available to Dorset Police. The high-profile murder of a young mother in Dorchester a few weeks later was deemed a higher priority. So, after a handful of interviews that started next to her hospital bed, the case was left unsolved.
Melissa no longer wants to confess. She has done enough to her family, she knows that. Mark is like a ghost these days, and Tilly seems to have shrunk into herself. She constantly sneaks looks at her mother as though she is a stranger. Melissa knows how she feels. She is like a stranger even to herself.
She picks up the pile of post from the kitchen surface now and goes to the table, catching a flash of red from her hair reflected in the side of the microwave. She isn’t used to it yet. She has kept her hair short and let her natural colour grow through.
Mark hasn’t said whether he likes it and she supposes she shouldn’t care. But she does. It’s so exhausting, tiptoeing around his anger and grief. Throwing all their money away as she did is unforgivable. Inexplicable. But she doesn’t regret it for a second.
She has told him the same story so often she half believes it now: Jamie stirred up bad emotions from her past; she feels guilty that he was murdered and that Hester became involved. She only wanted to help.
Kerry wrote to her, not long after. She was moving to Manchester to be with her mother. She said if Melissa thought she was forgiven for not helping Jamie when he needed it, she had ‘another thing coming’. Then she had awkwardly included something about Amber sending her love to the dog.
No, she doesn’t regret it.
But she’s sick of them looking at her like she is a stranger.
Last week at Couples Counselling, she had told Mark all about her childhood for the first time. He’d been shocked enough to cry a little but she remained dry-eyed. Afterwards, he had moved to hold her, but she had stepped to one side. She didn’t know how to be forgiven. It seemed like a coat that was too big or too small to wear.
As Melissa stares down at the pile of junk mail on the table, a thought seems to gain weight and form until it is a thing that slithers and twists inside her.
I could just leave, she thinks. Let them get on with their lives without me.
What is to stop her? None of them would really miss her. She’s nothing but trouble.
Melissa stands still for a few moments and then she is hurrying up the stairs and into her bedroom. She goes into her walk-in wardrobe and begins pulling out clothes and throwing them into a pile on the floor. She doesn’t need much. Just a few tops and some jeans. One decent jacket. She can’t seem to care about that stuff anymore. Scooping it all up in her arms she flings it onto the bed and goes to get her wheelie case from its place on top of the extra wardrobe in her bedroom. She tries to remember how this felt before, the specific dimensions of those moments, but they’re like a half-remembered dream and she can’t seem to grasp them.
As she stuffs clothes messily into the case, downstairs, her phone chimes with a text. Distractedly she goes to the bottom of the stairs and reaches for her bag, which she dropped in the hallway when she got home.
Melissa frowns when she sees it’s from Mark. This is such a rare occurrence now that she briefly wonders if something is wrong.
The message says:
Let’s me, you, and Tils go out for dinner together at the weekend. Somewhere nice as a family. She needs you and so do I. I miss you. Mx
Melissa slumps down onto the bottom stair, gazing at the screen. She begins to cry.
She cries for Jamie and she cries for Tilly. She cries for Mark. He isn’t the only cheat and she has done far worse things in the grand scheme of things. Then she cries for young Melanie with her hard, pretty little face and her broken heart.
Lastly she cries for the here and now and what has gone.
When she finishes she sits for a few moments longer and then begins to climb back up the stairs to unpack her case.