Further down the hill she passes the local newsagent. Here she buys a copy of the Hampstead Voice and heads back home.

  Roan is late back again that night. Roan is a child psychologist and works at the Portman Centre in Belsize Park. Having a husband who is a child psychologist is not as useful as it sounds. Her husband is, it would seem, only capable of empathising with children who have sociopathic tendencies (sociopathy in children is his specialism). Children like their own who are a bit odd in some ways, but perfectly and utterly normal in most of the other ways, seem to confound him entirely and he reacts as though he has never before encountered a teenage child or, indeed, had any personal experience of being a teenager himself whenever either of them does something that could only be described as the stereotypical behaviour of a teenager.

  This infuriates Cate, who has never felt more in touch with her own teenage self than she has since her children became teenagers, as if she has walked through a door at the far end of parenting and somehow met herself coming the other way.

  ‘How was your day?’ she calls out to him now, in the tone of voice she uses to lay out her intent to be pleasant. If she can start the evening’s discourse on a high note, then it can’t possibly be her fault if it all goes downhill later on. She has no idea if Roan can detect the hint of theatre in this particular tone but he responds from the hallway with a hearty:

  ‘Not at all bad. How was yours?’

  And then he is there, in the kitchen, her husband, his shaved head covered with a beanie, wrapped up against the January chill in a padded black jacket and gloves. He pulls off the beanie and puts it on the table. Then he pulls off his gloves, revealing long angular hands. He takes the cross-body bag off his shoulder and puts it on a chair. He doesn’t look at her. They don’t really look at each other any more. It’s fine. Cate isn’t in great need of being seen by him.

  His hand goes to the Hampstead Voice on the table. He looks at the headline. ‘Another one?’

  ‘Another one,’ she replies. ‘Next road down this time.’

  He nods, just once, carries on reading. Then he says, ‘Daylight.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘Horrific. That poor woman. Just going about her business. Thought it was going to be a normal day. Some sick little fuck decides he can do what he wants, decides he has the right to touch her body.’ She shudders as she thinks again of tiny Tilly, her wide eyes on her doorstep.

  Georgia walks in.

  She’s in her lounging gear: silky jersey shorts and a hoodie. Cate didn’t have lounging gear when she was a teenager; she had her clothes and her pyjamas and nothing in between.

  Roan puts the Hampstead Voice in front of her. ‘Look, Georgie,’ he says. ‘A sex attacker in the area. Last attack was just down the road. In the middle of the day. Please, please keep your wits about you. And try not to stumble about with your earbuds in.’

  Georgia tuts. ‘My wits are totally about me,’ she says. ‘Remember my wits are young. Not old and shit like yours. And I bet you anything it’s that guy.’ She taps the front page of the paper. ‘The one over the road. The creep. He looks totally rapey.’

  Cate shivers slightly at the mention of the man across the road and she flushes with shame. She hasn’t told Roan or the kids about calling the police and seeing them going to talk to him. She’s too embarrassed. It was such a middle class, meddling thing to have done.

  ‘How’s Tilly?’ she asks, moving the subject along. ‘Has she said any more to you about Monday night?’

  Georgia shakes her head. ‘Nope. I’ve tried talking to her about it but she won’t. She just says she’s too embarrassed.’

  ‘And what do you think? Do you think she made it up?’

  Her daughter considers the question. ‘In one way, yeah. I mean, it’s kind of the sort of thing she’d do? If you see what I mean? She’s lied about stuff before.’

  ‘What sort of stuff?’

  ‘Oh, just small things, like saying she knows the name of some, like, rapper, or someone on YouTube, and then when you ask her who it is you realise she hasn’t got a clue. So she says things sometimes just to fit in, to be one of the crowd. And she gets this, like, blind look in her eyes when she knows she’s been rumbled and then you feel really bad for putting her on the spot.’

  ‘But this, lying about something like this. Do you think she’s capable of a lie that big?’

  ‘I dunno,’ she says. Then she shrugs and says, ‘Yeah. Maybe. She overreacts to things. Maybe she just, you know, overreacted.’

  Cate nods. It’s possible, she supposes. But then her eye is caught once more by the headline on the front page of the Hampstead Voice and she feels a dark shadow of doubt passing through her head.

  7

  It’s the day before Valentine’s Day and Cate is in her local shopping centre looking for a card for Roan. She won’t get him anything romantic. Indeed, there have been at least a dozen years over the preceding thirty when she hasn’t got him a card at all. Valentine’s isn’t really their scene. But something about the fact that they’ve made it to another Valentine’s Day, still intact in spite of everything that happened last year, makes her think that a card might be in order.

  She picks up a card that has a drawing on the front of two stick figures, holding hands. The wording above their heads says: ‘Yay! We still like each other!’

  She puts it back on the shelf as though it has scalded her.

  She is not sure that she and Roan do.

  Eventually she picks up a card that simply says ‘I Love You Lots’, with a big red heart. This is true. She does still love him. The love part is simple; it’s everything else that’s complicated.

  It was this time, a year ago, Cate recalls, that she and Roan had nearly split up. It was just before the half-term. They’d thought that they might have to cancel a seven-thousand-pound holiday, that’s how bad it had been.

  It was her fault.

  All of it.

  She’d thought Roan was having an affair. No, not thought, believed, with every fibre of her being, with no element of doubt, without having ever seen Roan with another woman, without having found texts from him to another woman, without having seen so much as a smudge of lipstick on a collar. She’d gone completely mad for a while.

  For six months Cate had obsessively infiltrated all her husband’s most private spaces: his email account, his text messages, his WhatsApp, his photos, even his work documents. She’d pored over the terrible details of a psychologically scarred but very beautiful young girl, looking for something to back up her belief that Roan was having sex with her, shamelessly breaching the privacy of a child who’d thought that everything she’d said to her psychologist was shared in the strictest confidence.

  Roan had found out what she’d been doing in early February. Or, rather, she’d had to confess to what she’d been doing after he came home from work and told her that he thought his new assistant had been going through his patients’ private records and even his email and his phone and that he was monitoring her and was prepared to report her if necessary.

  She’d panicked at the thought of an official investigation and said, ‘It’s me. It’s me. It’s me,’ and started crying and tried to explain but made no sense, no sense at all because back then, for a few months, she’d been utterly, utterly mad.

  She’d hoped for his arms around her after her confession, for his low, reassuring voice in her ear saying it’s OK, it’s OK, I understand, I forgive you, it’s fine.

  Instead he’d looked at her and said, ‘That is about the lowest thing I’ve ever heard of in my life.’

  Of course he had not been having an affair. He had just been working late, stressed, dealing with unimaginable horrors on a day-to-day basis, dealing with a new assistant who was not up to scratch, with a sick father. He’d also been trying to get fit by taking up jogging on an ad hoc basis, and constantly frustrated that there was never enough time to get into a routine. He was just, as he’d said, struggling, struggling with it all. And there she’d been, idiot that she was, snuffling like a pig through his private affairs, breaching his professional security, endangering his job, imagining the very worst of him, the very worst.

  ‘Why on earth’, he’d said, looking at her imploringly, disbelievingly, ‘would I be having an affair?’

  Such a simple question. She’d paused and taken a moment to think about it. Why would he be having an affair?

  ‘Because I’m old,’ she’d said eventually.

  ‘I’m old too.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re a man. You don’t have a sell-by date.’

  ‘Cate,’ he’d replied. ‘Neither do you. Not to me. You and me, for God’s sake. We don’t have sell-by dates. We’re us. We’re just … us.’

  He’d moved out for a few days after that. It had been her idea. She needed to clear her head. When he came back, he’d said, ‘I feel like we’ve lost our thread. Like we were in the zone and now we’re out of the zone and I don’t know how to get back into it again.’

  And she’d said, ‘I feel the same way.’

  There’d followed a few days of existential drama and angst and many discussions about the cancellation of the extremely expensive skiing holiday and how the children might take it and looking at insurance policies (there was no special clause for ‘unexpected marital discord’). Then two days before they were due to fly, they’d shared a bottle of wine and had sex and decided just to go on the holiday and see if it fixed them.

  And it had, to a certain extent. The kids had been on good form, full of laughter, the sun had shone all day, every day, and the hotel they’d chosen had been jolly and full of nice people. They’d returned home a week later and both decided, subliminally and without further discussion, just to get on with it and forget that it had ever happened.

  But still, it had. She had crossed lines and boundaries, she’d broken the trust between them and even now she still feels like a lesser person. Being a mother had given her so much command over the moral high ground, but in six crazy months she’d ceded her position entirely and to this day she still flinches under Roan’s gaze, scared that he’ll see through her façade to the insecure, pathetic core of her. She feels safer now when he doesn’t look at her, when he doesn’t see her. Because if he can’t see her then he can’t hate her. And he hates her. She knows he does.

  Saffyre, that was the name of the patient whose private records she’d read through. Saffyre Maddox. She was fifteen years old at the time and had been self-harming since the age of ten.

  One day during the madness of last winter, Cate had actually gone to Saffyre’s school and watched her through the railings. There she was, the girl Cate had been so sure was having an affair with her husband: tall, lean, flat-chested, her dark curls pulled back into a bun, her hands in the pockets of her black blazer, pale green eyes scanning the playground, almost regal. Not at all what Cate had expected. She’d watched as a boy approached the girl, playfully trying to engage her in some kind of banter. She’d seen Saffyre’s eyes drift over his shoulder and then she’d watched the boy fade away, go back to his friends, his good-natured demeanour that of someone who hadn’t expected much more than he’d got.

  Then two girls had walked towards Saffyre and the three of them had fallen into step together, heading back to the school building.

  Saffyre hadn’t looked like a girl who cut herself with unfurled paperclips. She’d looked like the Queen Bee.

  The last time Cate saw Saffyre was a couple of months after they’d moved to the flat in Hampstead. She’d been walking down the Finchley Road with an older man and she’d been pulling a nylon shopping trolley behind her.

  Cate had followed them for a while, her heart racing lightly with fear of being caught. The older man had a pronounced limp, and Saffyre stopped every moment or so to allow him to catch up with her before they both turned into an estate at the Swiss Cottage end of the Finchley Road and disappeared through aluminium doors at the bottom of a tower block.

  As the door closed behind them, Cate stopped and caught her breath, suddenly aware of what she was doing. She’d turned quickly and headed home at a brisk pace trying to purge the wrongness from her psyche.

  8

  Roan passes Cate a red envelope across the table the following morning with a shy smile. ‘Don’t worry if you haven’t,’ he says. ‘It was just a … you know …’

  She smiles and takes her own red envelope from her handbag and hands it to him. ‘Go us,’ she says lightly.

  They open their envelopes in tandem, slightly awkwardly. Roan’s card to Cate is a Banksy. It’s a Band-Aid-covered red heart balloon from a wall in Brooklyn in New York. It’s beyond apt.

  She opens the card.

  There in his loose scrawl are the words: ‘Are you ready to take off the plasters yet?’

  She glances at him across the table. A small laugh escapes her mouth. Her stomach knots and unknots pleasantly. She says, ‘Are you?’

  He drops his head into his chest and then lifts it again. He’s smiling. ‘Totally,’ he says. ‘I have been for a long time. I just …’ He glances down at the card she’s just given him, with its bland inscription: ‘To my lovely husband, Happy V Day! Love, C x’. ‘I’ve been waiting,’ he says.

  She nods. She’s confused for a moment about who exactly has been wearing plasters on their hearts, about who’s been healing and who’s been waiting. She’d thought it was the other way around. That she’d hurt him.

  ‘Shall we go for a drink tonight?’ he suggests. ‘Somewhere a bit shit maybe? Everything else’ll be fully booked.’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll think of somewhere a bit shit.’

  After Roan leaves, Cate opens her laptop and starts work. She’s slightly unnerved by the interaction with her husband. Everything has felt so off-kilter since they moved here. Even her marital disharmony has changed somehow, shifted along a little to a place that she doesn’t quite recognise. She almost misses how straightforward it had felt in the months after her confession to Roan. Roan good. Cate bad.

  But since moving to Hampstead she’s not so sure any more. Roan’s behaviour had been strange. For months. He had come home late and been distracted and impatient with her and the children. He had cancelled family plans at short notice, often without a reasonable explanation. He had taken whispered calls on his mobile phone behind locked doors and out on the street. There’d been something. Definitely. Something.

  She picks up his card again, reads the words again. It’s virtually an admission that she had reason to be hurt too. But by what? By his harsh response to her behaviour? Or by something else? She closes the card and puts it upright on the table. As she works, her eye keeps being drawn back to it.

  She’s too unfocused to work so she flicks screens to her browser and types in ‘pubs near me’. As she scrolls through, she’s aware of the clatter of the letterbox in the communal front door, the thump of mail hitting the doormat. She jumps to her feet, glad of the distraction, and goes to the hallway to collect the post. She removes the letters for the other residents of the house and takes her pile through to the flat. Most of them sport large white postal redirection stickers, obscuring their address in Kilburn. But one is handwritten and addressed directly to Roan, at this address.

  She stares at it for a moment. The handwriting is feminine, the postcode is incomplete and the contents are stiff, clearly a card of some kind. It could be anything, she theorises: a money-off invitation from the local dry cleaner’s, some fancy window cleaner’s business card. Anything.

  She leaves it on top of the pile on the kitchen table and goes back to her internet search for local pubs.

  A message arrives on her phone. It’s from Georgia.

  MUM. As if she was calling to her from down the hallway.

  She sighs and replies. Yes.

  Can you bring my form for the Geography trip? Like, now.

  Cate rolls her eyes. Where is it?

  Don’t know. Somewhere in kitchen.

  Cate scours the kitchen, fans through piles of her own paperwork, finally finds it in the recycling bin. She smooths it out and replies to Georgia. FFS. Got it. I’ll bring it in now.

  In truth she’s glad of the excuse to get out of the flat. It’s sunny out and she can pop to the shops on her way back. Plus she always gets a little thrill going through the door of her children’s secondary school, infiltrating the mysterious world they inhabit for eight hours a day.

  She passes the tower block on her way to school, the block she’d seen Saffyre entering all those months ago, pulling the wheeled shopper behind her. She slows for a moment and gazes up. The sunlight glitters off the windows, reaching high up into the sky. She thinks again about the card that arrived this morning, the feminine cursive addressed to Roan, and she can feel it bubbling to the surface once more, the itchy, discomfiting feeling that had plagued her into doing the unthinkable things she’d done a year ago.

  Quickly, she picks up her pace and carries on briskly towards the burgundy-clad walls of her children’s school where she’s buzzed in by a young woman behind a desk who smiles encouragingly at her as though Cate might be about to ask her something awkward.

  ‘For a student,’ she says, passing her the folded paper. ‘Georgia Fours in Eleven G.’

  ‘Oh, lovely, thank you. I’ll make sure she gets it.’

  Cate’s eyes scan the foyer, searching out a hint of a child she recognises, a little something to take away with her. But it’s lesson time and there are no children around. She heads back out on to the street and breathes in deeply. She’s conscious of her heart beating a little too fast. She’s aware of everything feeling heightened and highly tuned as though there’s a frequency in the air that she’s only just become aware of.

  In the supermarket she picks up avocados for Georgia, chicken goujons and a baguette for Josh, a litre of apple and mango juice that will be gone within thirty seconds of the children getting home from school. She picks up stock cubes and salt in a rare moment of remembering to get stock cubes and salt. She picks up butter and milk and a box of chocolate-covered honeycomb and pays using the self-service check out. There’s no one behind her in the queue so she scans slowly and calmly, her eyes going to the taxi rank outside; the same drivers are here every day, milling together on the pavement, a social scene of sorts. Then her gaze passes beyond the taxi drivers, towards the entrance to the Tube station where she sees a familiar figure heading inside. Tall, slim, a smooth dome of bare skull, a bag slung diagonally across his body, a pronounced ball-of-the-foot bounce in each step.