Page 9

Keep calm, she told herself.

She’s fine.

She shrugged her bag off her shoulder, fighting off the panic in the back of her mind, and then kept her tone even.

“Hey there, Snail,” she said. “Remember me?”

“Mommy!”

Siena got up and toddled over to her, the flag pulled over her shoulders like a cape, and then offered a gentle cuddle that Katie knelt down gratefully to accept.

“Daddy downstairs?” Katie said.

“Yes.”

“And have you been good for him since home time?”

“No.”

Katie ruffled her soft hair. “Good.”

She stood up and headed through to the kitchen, and then to the door that led down to the basement.

She and Sam had fallen in love with their cottage the first time they’d laid eyes on it. It had been at the end of a long month of house hunting, and the real estate agent had brought them to the property with the manner of someone showing a prospective owner the last and most hopeless dog in the pound. The cottage had been small and cramped, the walls speckled with mold, the paint flecked, the wallpaper peeling. It had smelled damp, and it had felt it too.

But as they looked around, Katie found she gradually stopped noticing the many things that were wrong with it and began focusing instead on the things that felt right. The exposed wooden beams in the front-room ceiling. The layout of the rooms. The way in which she could—almost without trying—already furnish the spaces in front of her. Bookcases here; a couch there; the bed like that with the dressers opposite. It was the strangest feeling, as though a future version of her knew this place by heart, but the her right then hadn’t yet reached that point in time.

She and Sam spent the next two years renovating it, doing the work themselves when they could and stretching their budget on a monthly basis when they needed help. Ever so slowly, it had become not just a house but a home. And it turned out that everything had fit exactly where she’d imagined it would. Wherebothof them had.

For Sam, that meant the basement.

The music grew louder as she opened the door and headed down the stone steps. The basement was the size of the living room above, but even that was barely enough space to contain the equipment her husband had amassed over the years. There were guitars and bass guitars stored upright in a cluster of stands by one wall. A drum kit in one corner. Racks of the headphones he used for his silent discos. A keyboard that seemed longer than the average human being. The floor was a swirl of foot pedals and cables, the latter concentrated around a table covered with computer equipment, where Sam was standing right now.

He had his back to her and was staring intently at one of the screens. From what she could see of the detail there, it might have been monitoring the vital signs of a whole hospital ward.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

Sam pressed a button and the music stopped.

“Listen,” Katie said, “I don’t know if you remember, but we have a child?” She held her palm out at waist height. “Little person, about thistall? Arrived a few years ago now, I guess, but the occasion was reasonably memorable.”

She tried to keep her tone lighthearted, but inside she was seething. Siena was fine, and she knew she was worrying needlessly, but that did nothing to still the alarm sounding in the back of her mind. Sam had been downhereand Siena had been upthere, and that meantshe had not been safe. Because that was the way the world worked. You couldn’t make assumptions and take chances. You didn’t know when bad things were going to happen until they already had, and by then it was too late.

Sam turned around and smiled. Despite herself, the cold feeling inside her melted slightly. Whenever he smiled like that, she felt the time dropping away. His hair hadn’t changed over the years, and his smile made him look so much like the carefree teenage boy she’d fallen in love with that it was often hard to remain angry.

“But she’s fine, right?” Sam said.

Katie folded her arms. “Well, she was watching television.”

“Television is very educational these days.” He checked his watch. “And I needed to sort this. You’re back later than usual.”

“I went to one of my kids’ houses on the way home.”

“How come?”

“You remember me telling you about Gareth Field? He wasn’t in school again today, so I decided to talk to his mother.”