‘Truelove Rasheed?’
‘Rasheed-Leeson – I don’t know why you’d think I’m ditching my surname, Dad. Think again.’
‘Truelove? Really?’
‘Did the Braids dump you as friends?’ Zannah asks me. ‘Why?’
I look at Dom.
‘What?’ he says.
‘I’m waiting to hear your answer.’
‘I’ve no idea what happened. All I know is, one minute they were our friends and then we never saw them again.’
‘Wait, what?’ says Zan. ‘Dad, a minute ago you said they dumped you.’
‘Well, I assumed … Was it us that dumped them?’ he asks me.
‘By “us”, do you mean me? You’d remember if you’d been responsible for ending the friendship, presumably.’ Why am I pushing this? It’s the last thing I want to think or talk about.
I need to get away from this for a while.
‘Have I done or said something wrong?’ Dominic looks at Zannah, then at me. In a different frame of mind, I would find this endearing. Of the four of us, he’s always the most willing to accept that something might be his fault.
‘Dad has no idea why our friendship with the Braids ended,’ I tell Zannah, on my way out of the room.
3
I wake up. The curtains in our bedroom are open. It’s dark outside, in that thorough way that looks like the night trying to tell you it hasn’t finished.
I reach out and pat the top of my bedside cabinet but my phone’s not in the place it always spends the night, plugged into the charger. And I’m still in my clothes, lying on the bed, not in it. That’s right: I left Dom and Zannah in the kitchen and came in here, when I couldn’t stand to hear any more stupid, outlandish theories. I must have closed my eyes …
I hardly ever remember my dreams but this time I’ve dragged a vivid one out of sleep with me: Dominic and I found three new rooms in our house that we’d never noticed before, and were really excited about having more space.
Maybe it was real. Maybe if I looked now, I’d find those three extra rooms. It’s no more implausible than what happened in Hemingford Abbots.
Now that I’m less tired, my certainty has returned: I saw them. I saw five-year-old Thomas and three-year-old Emily. Not different children with the same names. I saw the same Thomas and Emily Braid, the ones I knew twelve years ago.
Except that’s impossible.
‘Dominic?’ I call out.
The house responds with silence. I get up, take a sip of stale water from the glass by my bedside that’s still half full from God knows when, and go upstairs to where Zannah and Ben’s rooms are, and Dom’s office. Our bedroom is on the ground floor, with what the estate agent called a ‘dressing room’ attached to it. It’s a large, modern room that the previous owners added on. I knew as soon as I saw it that I could add an extra door to make it directly accessible from the hall and it would be the perfect treatment room. Who would want to waste a brilliant space like that on getting dressed?
I told the agent how I planned to use the room. He blinked at me, and continued to refer to it as the dressing room for the rest of the viewing. His final words of wisdom before we left were: ‘People worry about kerb appeal, but bear in mind, the inside of the house is the bit you’re going to be seeing day in, day out.’
‘What a dick.’ Dom laughed as we drove away. ‘Does he think we’re going to blindfold ourselves every time we get out of the car and walk to the front door? He basically told us he thinks the house is hideous.’
I can’t understand how anyone could think Crossways Cottage looks anything but beautiful from the outside. Unusual, yes, but lovely. As soon as I saw it, I adored the strange, two-buildings-stuck-together effect. It seemed so perfect for a house on a village green. Half of it’s a white-fronted traditional cottage with a thatched roof and the other half is a joined-on barn conversion: black-painted wood. The two completely different roofs meet in the middle, and are different heights – one around a foot lower than the other. The overall effect is charming, not ugly. Unlike all the houses around it, which face the green head-on, ours stands at an angle, hence its name. If we ever have to move, I’ll show people round myself instead of leaving it to a useless estate agent. I’ll say, ‘Look how stunning it is – you’ll be lucky if I agree to sell you this house at any price.’
On the first floor, Zannah and Ben’s bedroom doors are wide open. Both of them close their doors whenever they’re in their rooms, to remind intrusive parents to stay out. Dom’s office door is closed, with a sliver of light visible underneath it. I can hear his fingers tapping at the keyboard.
I push open the door and find him slumped at his computer. ‘Sit up straight. Your back,’ I remind him.
‘I wondered why it was aching.’ He stays in the same position, staring at the screen, which is full of different versions of the same logo: three letters twisted artfully around one another, a well-known local company’s initials. ‘Which do you think’s the strongest?’ Dom asks. ‘I mean, obviously no one apart from the woman who commissioned them will notice the difference or care, but I have to pretend to have a strong opinion by next week.’
‘What time is it?’
‘Five to … uh … twelve. Shit. It’s nearly midnight.’
For the first time since seeing what I saw in Hemingford Abbots, I wonder: could something be wrong with me? I’ve slept through the whole evening.
No. I’m fine. I needed to recharge, that’s all.
Is it? What about seeing the impossible?
‘Where’s Zan?’ I ask.
‘She went to Victoria’s.’
‘Is she staying overnight?’ It’s not unheard of for lifts home to be requested as late as 2 a.m.
‘Yup. We can go to bed with no fear of chauffeur duties.’
‘I’ve just been asleep for three hours. I’m not tired.’
‘Well …’
‘What?’
‘I think you’re more exhausted than you realise, Beth.’
‘Dom, I’m wide awake. I’ve just—’
‘I’m not saying come to bed now if you don’t want to, but … what happened to you today, and then sleeping all evening …’
‘For God’s sake, Dom. You have naps all the time.’ I’m unreasonably annoyed with him for having the same worry I just had; it makes it harder to dismiss.
‘I think you’ve been stressing out and pushing yourself too hard for too long. You have clients from 8 a.m. till 6 p.m. five days a week. You never take a proper lunch hour—’
‘That’s a normal working week. We have a huge mortgage to pay off, university costs coming up in a few years …’
‘I know. I just … it’s evenings too. You’re doing chores and admin till midnight, sometimes.’
I wish I could deny it, but I can’t. And there’s no point saying that he’s the one who’s working late tonight; we both know that if I hadn’t fallen asleep, we’d have spent the evening talking and Dom wouldn’t have considered coming up here to work on logos. He’d have gone to bed at half past ten or eleven and … yes, I’d then have done a couple of hours of admin. Is there any woman with a full-time job and a family who doesn’t need those hours between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. to catch up and stay afloat? Probably. I don’t know any.