Page 14

FOURTEEN

Ash goes to the cute little café across the street from the boutique and buys her usual lunchtime avocado, tomato, and vegan pesto panini.

The couple who run the café are thirtyish and have a small, scruffy dog that sits in the window in a plaid jacket, watching the world go by.

They are both smiley and comfortable in each other’s company.

Ash watches the way they negotiate the narrow space behind the counter like a choreographed dance and she thinks, How did you meet each other?

How did you know? How did you find the money to start a café?

How did you know that was what you wanted to do? What is it like to be you ??

She taps her card to the contactless reader and smiles at the woman, who is probably only five years older than her but so clearly a woman and not a girl, and she takes her panini from the café, petting the dog as she passes.

She sits on a bench on the promenade overlooking the sea, which is gray and frantic in the wind rolling in from the south.

It’s not, she thinks, as she unwraps the paper from around the sandwich, that she wants a husband, or even a boyfriend.

She just wants to know that the boyfriend or the husband will arrive at some point.

That the job will arrive. That the career and the dog and the flat and the whole deal will arrive.

It doesn’t have to be now. But some sort of guarantee would quell the fear.

She sees two girls she went to school with walking past, one with a red cockapoo, the other with a golden cockapoo.

The friends, who are wrapped up in similar full-length puffa coats and are wearing similar bobble hats, clutch coffee in paper cups and are lost in a deep conversation.

As they pass, Ash sees that one of them—she thinks her name is Lauren, she’s not quite sure—is pregnant.

They don’t notice her as they pass and she is glad; she realizes that she has let them all go, all the local friends, because she thought she was gone from this place, thought her time here in this small seaside village was done, that she didn’t need them anymore.

But then she clearly didn’t have any idea who she was back then, what she was capable of, how badly she could possibly mess everything up.

She’d thought she was normal back then.

And now she knows she’s not.

The house is empty when Ash gets home that afternoon and she patrols it for a while, looking at all the places that Nick had been that weekend, looking for bits of him. She doesn’t know why. It’s as if, she suddenly realizes with a shot of dark dread, she’s obsessed with him.

She goes to her mother’s bedroom and opens the door, looks at the bed, loosely made in that way her mother always makes beds, like she doesn’t really believe in making beds but does it anyway.

She goes to her mother’s en suite and stares at the shelves above the sink, the rows of lotions and serums and cotton buds, HRT patches in a little pink packet.

She opens the cabinet and looks for her father’s razor, which is still there where he left it the day he went into town to help celebrate his friend’s restaurant opening and didn’t come back.

Her mother said she would never move it, that it would stay there forever.

But now there is Nick Radcliffe, and how will Nick Radcliffe feel about this razor, still with flecks of Paddy Swann’s wildly multicolored stubble in it?

The toilet seat is up, she notices, then pulls the sleeve of her jumper over her hand to pull it down. How rude, she thinks, to leave the lid of your new girlfriend’s toilet open in the bathroom she once shared with her dead husband. How incredibly rude.

She goes to the head of her mother’s bed and looks at the pillows, hastily plumped into a haphazard pile.

She sees a single white hair, so white, the color of fresh snow.

She shudders, thinking of Nick Radcliffe’s head on the pillow, his body in these sheets.

Why did he have to come here? Why couldn’t he have invited Ash’s mother to his place, in Tooting?

Why, she wonders, would anyone want to have sex in the bed of a dead man?

And then her eye is caught by something on the floor by her father’s side of the bed. It’s buried in the thick shag pile of the lambskin rug that covers the wooden floorboards: a simple gold ring. Big. Too big to be one of hers or one of her mother’s.

She jumps at the sound of the front door banging open and closed and then her mother’s voice up the stairs: “Ash! Are you home?”

“Yes. I’m here. Coming down.”

She picks up the ring and stares at it for a moment, then tucks it in her pocket and heads downstairs to greet her mother.