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‘What’re you doing?’ he asks softly.
Max twists around, his eyes showing white. ‘Dad,’ he begins. ‘I was just … I thought I’d check her room. See if …’ He looks at the bra, blinks. ‘If …’
‘Put it back,’ Joseph whispers. ‘Close the drawer. Go downstairs.’
Max rolls his tongue around his teeth. Then, his face flushed, he does as his father asks.
Outside, it grows dark. Enoch’s house phone doesn’t ring and Drew doesn’t walk through the front door. Joseph brews more coffee. Enoch drinks another beer.
By eleven p.m., work on the action plan has slowed. Conversation dries up, too. The tick of the wall clock grows louder, as sinister as an old-fashioned movie bomb timer.
By midnight, even Tilly looks like she’s flagging. Joseph starts wondering how much longer Erin intends to stay. He’s due in the office tomorrow, not that he can afford to go; not with Drew’s body still inside the Honda; and not with the bungalow still available for viewings because he’s too worried about how it might look should he suddenly take it off the market.
At one a.m., Enoch belches and announces he’s going to bed. It’s the trigger for a general exodus. Tilly and Erin take turns to embrace him. Enoch clutches Erin far longer than is comfortable for her or anyone watching. Joseph, next in line, shakes hands as briefly as etiquette will allow. Max slides past without touching Enoch at all.
Erin drives them home. As soon as they’re through the front door, Max and Tilly go up to bed. Joseph limps into the kitchen. ‘You want a drink?’ he asks Erin. He knows that a confrontation is coming. Maybe, if he blunts her intuition with alcohol, he’ll struggle through.
‘It’s late,’ she says.
‘I know.’
Erin massages her neck. Then she sighs. ‘Bar tender, pour me a cognac.’
From somewhere he finds a laugh. ‘You want to drink cognac in this heat?’
‘I know what I want in this heat, but cognac first, with ice. And yes, I know a puppy dies somewhere whenever I mention cognac and ice in the same breath. I hope it wasn’t a cute one.’
She throws her bag on to the sofa near the bifold doors and slumps down next to it. ‘God, that was hard. Not just hard, actually. Kind of weird. Enoch’s a strange guy.’
Joseph grunts. ‘Even a missing daughter didn’t stop him from copping a feel.’
‘Jealous?’
‘What?’
‘I saw the way you were looking at him.’
‘How did you expect me to look?’
She shrugs. ‘I like it when you get all protective.’
Joseph drops ice cubes into Erin’s cognac. This isn’t the interrogation he was expecting. Something’s going on here; he just can’t figure out what. Opening the fridge, he grabs another beer.
‘Careful,’ his wife says, sipping her drink. ‘Once I finish this, I want you fully functional.’
He flinches at that, hadn’t expected it at all. Is Erin switching tack? Is this an alternative ploy to get him talking? Or has Drew’s disappearance highlighted her own mortality, and sex is how she intends to fight back? Maybe the drama of current events has energized her. She always seems most alive when she’s at the heart of a crisis, directing the response. Her actions at Enoch’s, developing a plan for the rest of them to implement, were classic Erin.
Joseph feels her gaze as he pours beer into a glass. When he meets it, he’s surprised by its raw hunger. How long has it been since they were intimate? More than a few months, he thinks. Probably not even this year.
It had taken her words at the party to see how bad he’d let things get:Sometimes it feels like we’re two strangers living inthe same house … Being married to you – it’s been lonely at times, particularly these last six months … Are you happy, Joe? With me and with Tilly? Do you still want this?
Strange, really, that while the last seventy-two hours have plunged him into a nightmare, in some ways he feels like he’s waking from a dream.
The guilt that’s eaten at him like a cancer these last five years – guilt at Claire’s death, guilt at embarking on a new relationship, guilt that he’d neglected Max – has achieved nothing but further pain. It shouldn’t have taken the tragedy unfolding around him to realize that.
In hindsight, he’d had so much to be thankful for, chief among them Erin, who’d seen something in him to cherish despite his manifest failures. And he never could have anticipated, as their two broken families became one, just how close Max would grow to his stepmother, or how close Max and Tilly would grow to each other.
For it to have happened like it had, for all four of them to have knitted together so seamlessly, he should have felt joy. Instead, he’d felt a mushrooming fear. The knowledge that he couldn’t guarantee his new family’s safety – that he’d failed at that task once before – had begun to obsess him, overwhelm him. Somewhere along the way, perhaps he’d lost sight of what he’d found: the extraordinary privilege of new love.