The Turn of the Key

“No,” I said forcefully. “That’s nothing to do with it. Jack, I’m a grown woman, I’ve been hit on before; it’s nothing I couldn’t handle. The attic stuff is completely unrelated. This is—it’s something else.”

“It’s fucking disgusting, is what it is.” His cheeks were flushed, and he stood, as if unable to contain his anger while sitting still. He paced to the window, then back, his fists clenched. “I’d like to—”

“Jack, leave it,” I said, urgently. I stood up too, and put my hand on his arms, pulling him round to face me, and then— God, I don’t even know how it happened.

I don’t have the words for it, without writing it like a trashy novel. Melting into each others’ arms. Lips coming together like a crash of waves. All those stupid clichés.

Except there was no melting. No softness. It was hard, and fast, and urgent, and more than a little painful in its intensity. I was kissing and being kissed, and then I was biting, my own skin between his teeth too, and then my fingers were in his hair, and his hands were fumbling my buttons, and then it was skin against skin and lips against lips and—I can’t write this to you. I can’t write this but I can’t stop remembering it. I don’t know how to stop.

*

Afterwards, we lay in each others’ arms in front of the wood fire, our skin slicked with sweat and stickiness, and he fell asleep, his head on my breast, rising and falling gently with every breath I took. For a while, I just watched him, the way his skin paled to milk white below his hips, the brush of freckles on the bridge of his nose, the dark sweep of his lashes on his cheeks, the curl of his hand around my shoulder. And then I looked up, to the mantelpiece above us both, where the baby monitor sat, silently waiting.

I could not go back. And yet I had to.

At last, when I could feel I was beginning to slip into sleep myself, I knew that I had to get up or risk lying here all night, and waking to find the girls making their own breakfast, while I conducted a chilly walk of shame back to the main house in the dawn light.

And there was Rhiannon too. I couldn’t take the chance of her finding me here when she did come back from wherever she was. I had enough explaining to Sandra to do already, without adding nighttime walks to the agenda.

Because I had to fess up to her. That was the only possibility, I had realized that as I lay in Jack’s arms . . . maybe I had even known before. I had to fess up to everything, and risk losing the job. If she sacked me—well, I couldn’t blame her. And in spite of everything, in spite of the financial hole I would find myself in, with no job, and no money, and no references, in spite of all that, I would just have to suck it up, because I deserved it.

But if I explained, if I really explained why I had done what I’d done, then maybe, just maybe . . .

I had my jeans almost on when I heard the noise. It was not over the baby monitor but coming from somewhere outside the house, a noise halfway between a crack and a thud, as if a branch had fallen from a tree. I stopped, holding my breath, listening, but there were no more sounds, and no squawking wail from the baby monitor to indicate that whatever it was had woken Petra and the others.

Still, I pulled out my phone and checked the app. The camera icon marked Petra’s room showed her flung on her back with her usual abandon; the picture was pixelated and ill-defined in the soft glow from the night-light, but the shape was clear. As I watched, she sighed and stuck her thumb in her mouth.

The camera in the girls’ room showed nothing at all, I’d forgotten to switch their night-light on when I tucked them in, and the resolution was too poor to show anything except grainy black, punctuated by the occasional gray speckle of interference. But if they’d woken up they would have switched on the bedside light, so the absence was good news.

Shaking my head, I buttoned up my jeans, pulled my T-shirt over my head, and then bent and very softly kissed Jack on the cheek. He said nothing, just rolled over and murmured something indistinct that might have been, “?’Night, Lynn.”

For a moment my heart stilled, but then I shook myself. It could have been anything. ’Night, love. ’Night then. And even if it was ’Night, Lynn or Liz, or any other name, so what? I had a past. Maybe Jack did too. And God only knew, I had too many secrets of my own to hold someone else’s up to the light to condemn them.



I should have just left.

I should have picked up the baby monitor, walked to the door, and let myself out.

But before I returned to the house, I could not resist one final look back at Jack, lying there, his skin golden in the firelight, his eyes closed, his lips parted in a way that made me want to kiss him one last time.

And as I glanced back, I saw something else.

It was a purple flower, lying on the countertop. For a minute I couldn’t work out why it looked familiar, nor why my gaze had snagged on it. And then I realized—it was the same as the flower I had found the other morning in the kitchen and put into the coffee cup to revive. Had Jack left the flower on the kitchen floor? But no—he had been away that night, running errands for Bill . . . hadn’t he? Or was that a different night? Lack of sleep was making the days blur, run into each other, and it was becoming hard to remember which of the long, nightmarish stretches of darkness belonged to which morning.

As I stood there, frowning, trying to remember, I noticed something else. Something even more mundane. But something that made me stop in my tracks, my stomach lurching with unease. It was a little coil of string. Totally innocuous—so why had it unnerved me so?